Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Made Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier

by Edward Glaeser

  But as India and China get richer, their people will face a choice that could dramatically affect all our lives. Will they follow America and move toward car-based exurbs or stick with denser urban settings that are far more environmentally friendly? If per capita carbon emissions in both China and India rise to U.S. per capita levels, then global carbon emissions will increase by 139 percent. If their emissions stop at French levels, global emissions will rise by only 30 percent. Driving and urbanization patterns in these countries may well be the most important environmental issues of the twenty-first century.

  Indeed, the most important reason for Europe and the United States to get their own “green” houses in order is that, without reform, it will be awfully hard to convince India and China to use less carbon. Good environmentalism means putting buildings in places where they will do the least ecological harm. This means that we must be more tolerant of tearing down the short buildings in cities in order to build tall ones, and more intolerant of the activists who oppose emissions-reducing urban growth. Governments should encourage people to live in modestly sized urban aeries instead of bribing home buyers into big suburban McMansions. If ideas are the currency of our age, then building the right homes for those ideas will determine our collective fate.

  The strength that comes from human collaboration is the central truth behind civilization’s success and the primary reason why cities exist. To understand our cities and what to do about them, we must hold on to those truths and dispatch harmful myths. We must discard the view that environmentalism means living around trees and that urbanites should always fight to preserve a city’s physical past. We must stop idolizing home ownership, which favors suburban tract homes over high-rise apartments, and stop romanticizing rural villages. We should eschew the simplistic view that better long-distance communication will reduce our desire and need to be near one another. Above all, we must free ourselves from our tendency to see cities as their buildings, and remember that the real city is made of flesh, not concrete.

  CHAPTER 1

  What Do They Make in Bangalore?

  A high fence of trees and shrubs surrounds the MindTree campus in Bangalore’s aptly named office park, Global Village. Outside that leafy barrier, the streets churn with hawkers and auto rickshaws and the energy of messy urban life. Inside the wall, elegant buildings rise from manicured gardens, and peace reigns amid palm trees, glass, and cool gray stone. MindTree is one of Bangalore’s many successful information technology companies, cofounded by Subroto Bagchi, who bounds around its campus in immaculate ivory sneakers and a polo shirt. Bagchi looks like a Silicon Valley mogul, speaks like a management guru, and seems equally at ease with investors from Singapore, software engineers from India’s poorest regions, and even a socially awkward Harvard professor.

  Bagchi’s openness is reflected in the obstruction-free plan of his company’s compound, which encourages employees to mingle. The entire staff gathers to eat the buffet lunch on the roof and take in the view over the sprawl of one of Asia’s most productive cities. Smaller Bangalore start-ups locate in less pristine space, perhaps a cramped apartment in an older building in a crowded neighborhood. In these less formal settings, there’s a computer here, a computer there, and sometimes a mattress in the corner for those who work late. But however different their office space, the shoestring start-up and the established IT enterprise share the same remarkable energy and the same focus on selling their products worldwide.

  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. Anyone who builds a large factory and employs unskilled workers must contend with India’s powerful labor unions. The information technology business is less fettered by these constraints. There are few unions in IT, ideas don’t need roads to move across continents, and every successful Internet firm can afford a backup generator.

  There’s still plenty of hunger in rural India today, but the software entrepreneur has joined the starving peasant and the caste-conscious Brahmin in the roster of Indian stereotypes. Ruban Phukan is one of Bangalore’s Internet entrepreneurs whose path illustrates how Bangalore educates and empowers the young and talented. He grew up in Guwahati, in eastern India far from Bangalore, then went to Karnataka Regional Engineering College. In 2001, he became the fifteenth employee of Yahoo!’s Bangalore operation, where he studied rival Internet search engines. At Yahoo! he met a business partner, and Yahoo! stock options gave him enough cash to become an entrepreneur.

  In 2005, he established www.bixee.com (meant to sound like big sea), an Indian job-search engine that aggregates information from different sites like monster.com. Phukan and his partner developed their software on a shoestring, then sold it to MIH Holdings, for a substantial sum (by Bangalore standards). One ranking agency claimed that Bixee had over a hundred thousand unique visitors each day in 2010. At MIH, Phukan worked to develop ibibo .com, initially a social-networking and video-sharing site that allows ordinary people to showcase their talent and Bollywood film producers to showcase their movies. He has since left MIH to develop new social media software.

  In the nineteenth century, cities like Buenos Aires and Chicago were conduits across continents for beef and grain. Today, Bangalore is a conduit for ideas, an urban education hub where private firms train thousands of young Indians like Phukan. New technologies have made it easy to connect between Yahoo!’s Silicon Valley headquarters and a Bangalore subsidiary, but easy international connections haven’t flattened India. Globalization has made some places, like Bangalore, far more important and successful than others. Phukan could never have become a software entrepreneur if he’d stayed in Guwahati.

  Ports of Intellectual Entry: Athens

  More than 2,500 years before Ruban Phukan started working for Yahoo! in Bangalore, cities were gateways between cultures. Ports on the Pearl River, cities on the Silk Road, and other ancient imperial entrepôts all encouraged world travelers to meet and exchange ideas. The great dance of civilizations, in which knowledge moved from East to West and back again, has unfolded largely in cities. Bangalore is simply the latest venue for that age-old dance.

  In the sixth century B.C., Athens was hardly the intellectual center of the world. The most exciting Greek thinkers lived on the edges of the Greek diaspora in Asia Minor, where they learned from the older civilizations of the Near East. Miletus, a wool-making port in western Turkey, produced the first philosopher, Thales, and the father of European urban planning, Hippodamus, whose gridlike plans provided a model for the Romans and countless cities since then.

  Athens grew by trading wine, olive oil, spices, and papyrus. The city cemented its power by leading the Greek resistance to the Persian invasions that had already ravaged places like Miletus. Just as rich, ebullient post-World War II New York attracted writers and painters from battle-scarred Europe, fifth-century-B.C. Athens pulled in the best minds of battle-scarred Asia Minor. Hippodamus came from Miletus to plan the city’s harbor. Others came to tutor wealthy Athenians. This first generation of Athenian scholars then influenced their friends and students, like Pericles and Socrates. Socrates generated his own innovations and taught Plato, who taught Aristotle.

  This remarkable period saw the birth not only of Western philosophy but also of drama and history, as artists and scholars from all over the Mediterranean world converged in a single spot that gave them the proximity and the freedom to share their ideas. Athens flowered because of small random events that then multiplied through urban interaction. One smart person met another and sparked a new idea. That idea inspired someone else, and all of a sudden something really important had occurred. The ultimate cause of Athenian success may seem mysterious, but the process is clear. Ideas move from person to person within dense urban spaces, and this exchange occasionally creates miracles of human creativity.

  The Greeks’ knowledge was preserved and enhanced for almost
a millennium in the hubs of the classical world, like Alexandria, Rome, and Milan, as well as the cities of Persia and northern India, where Alexander the Great’s successors established Hellenistic states. The Roman cities of Western Europe—London, Marseilles, Trier, Tarragona—were marvels of the age that brought civilization to once savage places. Roman engineering made cities possible by delivering that great urban necessity, clean water.

  But while the Roman Empire had a good long run—far longer than the British Empire or, so far, the American republic—it did decline and ultimately fell to a wave of external invaders. In the fifth century, it still seemed possible that the barbarians who conquered Rome would leave its urban areas intact. Many of them, like Theodoric, saw the advantage of cities like Ravenna. But while the Goths and Huns and Vandals and Burgundians were strong enough to smash the Roman Empire, they were not strong enough to maintain and protect its roads and infrastructure, and cities starve without well-functioning transport networks to deliver food and water.

  The urban world of the Roman Empire, which had produced so much culture and technology, was replaced by rural stagnation. As cities disappeared, knowledge itself moved backward. The Roman cities prized skills, while the world of rural warriors and peasants rewarded a strong arm more than a trained mind. At the peak of Rome’s power, Europe was on the world’s technological frontier, a worthy competitor with the advanced societies of China and India. No such claims of European eminence could be made in the centuries after Rome fell. In the eighth century, Charlemagne, the master of Europe, connected with Hārūn ar-Rashīd, the caliph of the Islamic world. The Frank was a semi-literate warlord, while his Arab counterpart was the urbane overlord of a sophisticated civilization. In the great metropolises of Asia, urban proximity was pushing humanity forward while rural Europe stood still.

  A thousand years ago, Europe had only four cities with more than fifty thousand people, one of which was the last vestige of Roman power, Constantinople. The other three—Seville, Palermo, and Córdoba—were all Islamic. The Islamic caliphates, which stretched from Persia to Portugal, created a new trading network that exchanged both goods and ideas over vast distances, and great cities emerged under the protection of powerful emirs and caliphs. Under their aegis, a renaissance began 1,200 years ago, not in Italy but in Arab cities. In these places, Greek and Indian and even Chinese knowledge passed to Islamic scholars. Eventually, these places would pass their knowledge back to the West.

  Baghdad’s House of Wisdom

  In fifth-century-B.C. Athens and twentieth-century New York, independent thinkers created innovations by competing and collaborating in a free market of ideas. But in the Islamic world, rulers created intellectual connection by imperial fiat. The Abbasid caliphs established their capital in Baghdad, about fifty miles north of ancient Babylon, and they wanted to adorn the new city with physical and human marvels. They collected scholars as if they were valuable baubles and eventually massed those minds in the House of Wisdom, a sort of research institution whose first job was to import the world’s knowledge and translate it into Arabic. The scholars there translated, among many other works, Hippocrates’ Aphorisms, Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Physics, the Old Testament, and the Sindhind, a compendium of Indian mathematical knowledge. At the start of the ninth century, Muhammad al-Khwārizmī drew from the Sindhind to develop algebra, which he essentially named. Al-Khwārizmī also brought Indian numerals into the Arab world. The philosopher Yaqūb al-Kindī wrote one of the first treatises on environmentalism, and made Greek philosophy compatible with Islamic theology. Medical knowledge came to Baghdad from the Persians; paper-making was brought there by Chinese prisoners of war. Over a golden six decades, a chain of brilliance made Baghdad the intellectual center of the Middle East and perhaps the world.

  In the medieval era, Eastern understanding trickled westward through Europe’s cities. Venice, Italy’s great eastern port, served as the gateway for ideas, as well as spices, throughout the Middle Ages. When the Spanish retook Toledo in 1085, its library became accessible to Christian scholars, who translated its classics into Latin. Thirteen years later, crusaders captured Antioch and gave European translators access to its stock of Arabic medical and science texts. In the Islamic cities of Spain, the largest urban areas in Western Europe, ancient texts were rediscovered, retranslated, and transferred to Christendom. Those texts came to the new universities of Padua and Paris, where a growing body of Europeans, such as Albertus Magnus and his student Thomas Aquinas, built on Greek and Islamic philosophy.

  Europe slowly became safer and more prosperous, and its cities gradually grew once again. The minds of the medieval world connected with each other as Europe urbanized anew, and the continent’s rate of innovation increased. In monasteries, Benedictine monks rediscovered the advantages of intellectual proximity. They recovered classic texts and experimented with agricultural innovations, like the waterwheel. Merchants congregated in trade fairs, which had some of the advantages of urban agglomeration without the fixed and vulnerable infrastructure. Eventually urban powerhouses like Bruges and Florence emerged, growing as centers of skill and commerce, protected by forces of armed artisans or mercenaries.

  Many factors help explain the rise of the West—the development of military prowess and technology through constant warfare, the painful acquisition of immunity to infectious disease through centuries of exposure, the consolidation of powerful nation-states—but the growing commercial cities of Italy, England, and the Low Countries did more than their share. The growth of cities run by merchants was considerably greater than the growth of cities led by princes and monarchs. These dense places were havens for innovation and were the nodes of a global trading network that brought in the knowledge of the East. The commercial cities developed the legal rules regarding private property and commerce that still guide us today; the Great Revolt that started in the trading and wool-making towns of the Low Countries established in Holland the first modern republic. Commercial cities and trading companies were directly responsible for many of the military victories—from the fall of Constantinople in 1204 to the Battle of Plassey 553 years later—that established Western Europe’s hegemony over the rest of the world.

  Westerners ultimately surpassed Asians in the development of originally Chinese ideas like printing and gunpowder. By the eighteenth century, Western technology and thought had come to dominate the world. Gradually, European learning started moving back east, and cities were, once again, the points through which knowledge passed.

  Learning in Nagasaki

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, European military might had proven its technological superiority over most of Asia, but one nation, Japan, remained almost completely independent of European control. When American ships showed up in 1853, Japan agreed to open itself to trade with outsiders, but still more or less on its own terms, and within forty years, Japan had thoroughly mastered Western ways and become a formidable power on the world stage. Between 1894 and 1910, the Japanese beat up the Chinese, just like a European colonial power, defeated Russia, and conquered Korea. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Japanese were building ships and airplanes as good as, and sometimes better than, their American counterparts. How could the Japanese catch up to the West so fast?

  One answer to this question lies in a city: Nagasaki. The first contacts between Japan and the West took place there in 1543, when Portuguese ships landed on the nearby island of Tanegashima. Over the next three hundred years, Nagasaki would be the conduit for all Western technology coming into Japan. The xenophobic Japanese policy of concentrating foreigners in one spot made it easy for Japanese to seek out Western learning. In 1590, Portuguese Jesuits set up East Asia’s first metal printing press in Nagasaki. Forty-six years later, the Jesuits were kicked out for their political meddling and religious proselytizing and were replaced by the Dutch East India Company, which would never let such matters get in the way of a profitable trading opportunity.

  B
ut the Dutch would soon give their hosts more than mere commerce. Western medicine entered Japan in the 1640s, as high officials and even the shogun himself sought care from the East India Company’s resident physician. Soon Japanese students were being trained and certified in Nagasaki, bringing European medical techniques to Japan. By the start of the nineteenth century, a Japanese doctor would perform the world’s first surgery under general anesthesia. The operation, a mastectomy, followed European procedures except that the doctor used a mixture of Eastern herbs to produce unconsciousness. By combining Eastern and Western knowledge, the Japanese had pulled ahead in medicine, and it would take forty years for Europeans to catch up.

  In addition to Western medicine, the Dutch brought the Japanese telescopes, barometers, camera obscuras, magic lanterns, and even sunglasses through Nagasaki. In 1720, an inquisitive shogun started allowing Western books in Japan; his interest in the West also led to “the gradual emergence of Edo [now Tokyo] as a new focus of Dutch Studies.” When the American gunboats showed up in 1853, the Japanese could quickly catch up to their new adversaries because they had many engineers trained in the “Dutch Studies.” In 1855, the Dutch gave the Japanese their first steamship, which would reside at the new Nagasaki Naval Training Station. As the Japanese started aggressively copying European military techniques, Nagasaki continued to be the port of entry for knowledge as well as goods. That military and technological know-how enabled Japan, within a hundred years, to conquer much of Asia and surprise the American Navy at Pearl Harbor.

  How Bangalore Became a Boom Town

  From classical Athens to eighth-century Baghdad to Nagasaki, cities have always been the most effective way to transfer knowledge between civilizations. This isn’t mere happenstance. Urban proximity enables cross-cultural connection by reducing the curse of communicating complexity, the fact that the possibility of a garbled message increases with the amount of information that is being transferred. It’s easy to get across a simple yes or no but much harder to teach someone astrophysics—or economic theory, for that matter.