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

by Edward Glaeser

  In a low-density exurb where it takes thirty minutes to get to a restaurant, families cook their own food, whether or not they are good cooks. The fact that I occasionally inflict my awful cooking on my family is in and of itself a searing indictment of suburbia. In cities, people find it easier to eat out and take advantage of trained cooks who have a proven talent at putting together a good meal. Urban eaters also take advantage of specialized infrastructure, like high-end kitchens and elegant dining rooms, the costs of which are spread over hundreds or thousands of customers.

  The very existence of professional cooks is one level of specialization, but of course big cities go far beyond this coarse division of labor. In New York, San Francisco, Chicago, or London, there are hundreds of targeted restaurants making food from distant parts of the globe and fusing geographically diverse cooking styles, catering to diverse sets of rich and poor consumers.

  While inns and taverns are ancient, restaurants—meaning places that actually attract people by their cooking—came into their own in Paris in the late eighteenth century. Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau is today credited as the first restaurateur. The odd use of the word restaurant to describe an eating establishment arose because Roze was selling healthy soups that were meant to restore, or restaurer, Parisians to robustness. Urban density created a market for specialized products, and healthy soups were one of those products. Roze’s establishment seated people separately, offered them a choice of foods, and charged them on the basis of what they ordered, not a fixed fee. He cleverly managed to avoid the catering guild’s harsh rules against selling food by paying a substantial sum to become an official caterer to the crown.

  The problem with Roze’s restaurant is that the food doesn’t appear to have been that good. Even in the best of circumstances, healthy soups aren’t always tasty, and Roze was an entrepreneur, not a chef. But his eatery set in the dense confines of Paris began a wave of innovation. In 1782, La Grande Taverne de Londres opened in Paris. According to Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the greatest of all foodies, its chef was “the first to combine the four essentials of an elegant room, smart waiters, a choice cellar, and superior cooking.”

  Before large urban markets, luxury cuisine, like secular drama, was a pastime of the nobility, who were the only customers rich enough to pay for their own chefs and their own acting troupes. In both cases, urban entrepreneurs realized that they could dispense with princely patronage if they could draw a large enough clientele. Naturally, that clientele was only found in cities. As drama and cooking became public, rather than private, pleasures, knowledge of each innovation spread more readily. Good restaurants both trained chefs and inspired their customers to improve their cooking at home.

  Restaurants, like pubs or coffeehouses, are also a way of adapting to the high price of urban space. City apartments often have tiny kitchens and no dining room. Eating or drinking out is a way to share common space so that the urbanite isn’t confined by a compact flat. In a sense, then, cities pull people out of private space into public areas, which helps make them centers for socialization and conspicuous consumption. The newly rich of the nineteenth century could go to Grand Vefour or to Maxim’s and show off their wealth without having to host their own grand galas.

  Cities have been cross-continental conduits for culinary knowledge just as surely as they have helped spread mathematics and marketing know-how. Delmonico’s of Manhattan may have had the first significant French chef working on American soil, serving Gilded Age feasts of Lobster Newburg and Baked Alaska to New York’s glittering gourmands. The greatest importer of French ideas into London was Auguste Escoffier, who learned his trade in Paris and Nice, then went on to cook in London at the Savoy Grill and the Ritz in the 1890s. Escoffier created his own dishes, like Peaches Melba and Tournedos Rossini, and trained his own students, who brought his ideas to the tables of New York.

  Despite Escoffier, forty years ago, London cuisine was better known for dreadful pork products, like the Scotch Egg, than for creative cooking. Yet today London has some of the best restaurants in the world. By importing talent from abroad and then allowing smart people to learn from one another, London has evolved into a superb place for a billionaire, or pretty much anyone else, to eat. The Roux brothers came to London from France and produced the first London restaurant to get three stars from the Michelin Guide. They trained a new generation of celebrity English chefs, such as the ubiquitous Gordon Ramsay, and then those chefs trained others.

  Some of the most exciting restaurants in London have imported ideas from farther away than France. India was the brightest jewel in Queen Victoria’s crown, and since her time, enterprising Indians have been coming to London. Today there are more than two hundred thousand Londoners who were born in India, and more than 5 percent of the city is of Indian descent. Just as Romanians brought pastrami to New York and Italians brought pizza to Chicago, Indians brought lamb vindaloo to London. A great Indian meal in London provides a very pungent example of the benefits that immigrants often bring to cities. Large cities are varied enough so that there is plenty of demand for even the most specialized cooking, while small towns in the United States must cater to such a wide range of palates that they are stuck serving that strange mélange, “continental cuisine.”

  Today, of course, Indian restaurants in London are more than just curry shops. In 2001, the Michelin Guide broke with its French haute cuisine traditions and gave stars to two Indian restaurants in London. One of the chefs responsible for those stars has followed the path of urban entrepreneurship and opened his own restaurant, Rasoi Vineet Bhatia, which well deserves the 27 rating for food it received from Zagat in 2010, only one point below the heights reached by Gordon Ramsay. London’s top Indian chefs were generally born in India, but they have also spent years in the competitive world of London cooking. Their food is experimental and presents Asian traditions with haute cuisine flair. A good argument can be made that this fusion of India and Europe beats anything cooked in Mumbai.

  The abundance of city amenities explains why urbanites are so much more likely to partake of public pleasures. Holding income, education, marital status, and age constant, over a twelve-month period, city residents are 19 percent more likely to go to a rock or pop concert, 44 percent more likely to visit a museum, 98 percent more likely to go to a movie theater, and 26 percent more likely to have a drink at a bar than their country cousins. These higherend entertainments, which feature live interactions instead of passive TV watching, also have a particular appeal to wealthier and more educated people. If the world continues to get richer and better educated, the urban entertainment advantage will become even more valuable.

  Shoes and the City

  Food and drama are two areas where cities have an edge. Fashion is another. Even in the eighteenth century, London was attracting the world’s best tailors, many of whose modern counterparts still ply their trade on Savile Row, which runs parallel to Bond Street and the Burlington Arcade. Mass production and cheap distribution costs have made it possible to buy inexpensive clothes online or at Target whose high quality would have made our grandparents jealous. Yet cities remain places where people disproportionately wear and buy expensive clothes.

  Between 1998 and 2007, the number of people in Manhattan working in clothing and accessories stores increased by more than 50 percent. While the recession has surely led to a drop in that figure, the long-run trend will certainly remain strongly positive. Despite the rise of Internet shopping, New York’s trendy boutiques and vast department stores have increased in size because New York’s richer citizens are willing to pay a premium for the experience of an elegant store. While most of America is a service economy that caters to the middle classes, Manhattan’s salespeople serve the urban haute bourgeoisie and the suburbanites who drive into the city to buy their Jimmy Choos.

  The success of Manhattan’s boutiques reflects the increasing desire for clothes that do more than just protect us from the elements. The demand for expensive
city-bought garments reflects a desire for works of art that delight us, tools to help us present ourselves to the world. In a diverse, complicated city, clothes indicate the interests and income of their wearer. Since cities have more social heterogeneity and more social interactions, clothing plays a somewhat more important role there than it does elsewhere. This might help explain why households in cities with more than a million people spend 42 percent more on women’s clothing than nonurban households, as a share of total household expenditures.

  There is even a statistical reality behind the passion for shoes of the urbanites in Sex and the City. Big-city households spend 25 percent more on footwear, again relative to their total budgets, than households outside of cities, presumably because they are buying fancier shoes, although it is possible that their shoe leather is wearing out faster pounding the city pavement. As in Sex and the City, the urban desire to present an attractive appearance also reflects the fact that big-city density serves to connect people romantically, creating a market for mates that is, in its way, as important as the labor market.

  London as Marriage Market

  London has its share of creative mixologists who produce new and sometimes startling cocktails, like the Lychee and Elderflower Collins served in the bar of the St. Martins Lane hotel. But for many single people, and for a few errant spouses, drinking well is only a minor part of the bar experience. Bars provide an opportunity for romantic encounters. Cities attract more single people than other areas, in part, because urban density increases the odds of meeting a prospective partner. The same logic that pulls workers and firms together in dense areas pulls men and women together in cities.

  The role of the city as marriage market helps us to understand the unusual demographics of dense urban areas. In 2008, the island of Manhattan housed 1.4 million people over the age of fifteen. Out of that group, about a third (460,000) were married and living with their spouses. About half of the population had never been married and about another 139,000 people were divorced. In the United States as a whole, about one half of people over fifteen are married and living with their spouses. Manhattanites are much more likely than other Americans to be singles between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four.

  Dense cities attract younger, single people for many reasons. Cities are good places to work hard and acquire knowledge. Suburbs cater to young parents because of better schools and larger homes, but cities also attract young single people because they are fun places to be young and single. Density and the ability to walk from bar to bar or restaurant to restaurant make them ideal places to meet the thousands of other young, single people who have come to the city for exactly the same reason.

  Cities are singles magnets, but they also attract the most economically successful couples because of the ability of both spouses to find suitable jobs within a big urban labor market. Researchers Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn have found that among couples, one of whom has a college degree, about 40 percent locate in large metropolitan areas, while among couples, both of whom have college degrees, 50 percent locate in such places.

  At the start of the twentieth century, when well-off women rarely worked, a well-educated successful man could run his business deep in the resourcerich hinterland. It didn’t much matter that his wife couldn’t get a decent job there. Today, that budding magnate’s spouse is more likely to be a highpowered lawyer herself, who probably won’t want to live in the middle of nowhere. So big cities like Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles increasingly attract power couples, both of whom need good jobs.

  The urban edge in bringing people together goes beyond romantic relations. People who live in cities can connect with a broader range of friends whose interests are well matched with their own. Paris is famous for its literary salons. New York had groups of like-minded souls such as the Algonquin Round Table. Nineteenth-century political movements like Italy’s Risorgimento and the Generation of 1837 in Argentina were hashed out in intellectual conversations held in the cafés and bookstores of Milan and Buenos Aires. Less dense areas provide people with a smaller range of potential dinner companions, another nonwork cost of living outside of cities.

  In 1892, Theodore Dreiser came to Chicago from small-town Indiana to write for the Chicago Globe. Over the next forty years, he became one of the great chroniclers of American urban life, who described, with equal insight, the hard life of the urban working class and the peccadilloes of the mighty. One of his greatest characters was Carrie Meeber, the heroine of his first novel, Sister Carrie.

  The novel begins with Carrie taking the train from rural Wisconsin to industrial Chicago. Chicago gives Carrie economic opportunity, but even more significant, an escape from the stultifying boredom of rural life. In the process of enjoying the pleasures and temptations of a big city, she manages to “ruin” a few city slickers, but Dreiser leaves us in no doubt that her life was a whole lot more interesting and fun than it would have been if she had stayed on the farm and married the earnest plowman five miles down the road.

  Sister Carrie’s somewhat sordid life reflects the availability of urban pleasures, but also the fact that traditional social mores tend to break down in big cities. If Carrie had carried on with married men so freely in rural Wisconsin, she would have been ostracized. In Chicago, she may have been disreputable and banned from polite society, but she still had plenty of other disreputable types to play with. The same thing was true of Frank Cowperthwaite, a Dreiser antihero based on a real-life streetcar magnate, Charles Yerkes, who found plenty of urban associates despite his scandalous behavior. For good and ill, cities have long freed people from social convention. Villages find it easy to impose rules because people who break those rules can be cut off from social connection and suffer, like the wearer of Hawthorne’s scarlet letter, the pain of solitude.

  In a big city, however, there’s always some new network to try, so no non-governmental group can enforce harsh rules on behavior without resorting to extralegal violence. Some cities, such as Puritan Boston or Calvinist Geneva, managed to maintain social discipline for a while, but these strictures always eventually break down. The more natural outcome for a city is the less restricted world of Paris or Chicago.

  When Are High Wages Bad?

  An increasingly wealthy and well-educated population, eager to sample new delights, is naturally drawn to big cities, which specialize in innovative pleasure. Novelty itself is a luxury good. Only the rich have enough resources to get bored with having excellent, ordinary food every day. As the world has gotten richer and more unequal, more people are willing to pay for the constant stream of new, high-end experiences that are most easily had in big cities.

  A vast array of publications and Web sites strive—and inevitably fail—to keep up with all the art openings, restaurant debuts, concerts, and other events that unfold every week in cities like Barcelona or Los Angeles or Tokyo. These experiences are so numerous and so evanescent that it might seem impossible to evaluate their effect on a city’s overall quality of life. How do we sort through all of them and determine whether cities are becoming more or less pleasant places to live?

  One of the bedrock principles of economics is that free lunches are rare and markets require trade-offs. Investors can choose assets with higher returns only if they also take on more risk; suburbanites can get a bigger lot at the cost of a longer commute. In comparing metropolitan areas, there is a three-way trade-off among wages, prices, and quality of life. Most of the time, high wages and high prices go together; high housing costs are the price of accessing high-wage cities. But even correcting for prices and an individual’s skills, real wages vary from place to place. Some cities, like San Diego and Honolulu, have unusually low real incomes, while others, like Dallas, Texas, and Rochester, Minnesota, have unusually high real incomes.

  Should everyone in Honolulu be rushing to Dallas? Of course not. High real wages are compensating for frigid winters in Rochester and broiling summers in Dallas. Low real wages are the cost of experiencing
the pleasures of San Diego and Honolulu. 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.

  I once estimated which American metropolitan areas were the most expensive, holding wages constant, and found that nine out of the top ten cities were in coastal California. Honolulu was the tenth city. When you look at which places have particularly low prices relative to incomes, you find spots that are too cold, like Anchorage, Alaska, and spots that are too hot, like Midland, Texas. Other places in that bottom-ten list, like Detroit or Trenton, have other problems, like crime and unemployment.

  Real wages—incomes corrected for local prices—are an effective tool for assessing urban amenities. If places have unusually low real wages, then quality of life must be high. If places have unusually high real wages, then something is wrong with those places. Somewhat paradoxically, the decline in real wages in places like New York provides us with the best evidence that, all in all, big-city amenities have become more valuable.

  In 1970, there was a strong positive relationship between city size and real wages. Real wages increased by 3 percent as area population doubled. The same relationship also held in 1980. In the 1970s, when New York was a battleground, workers had to be given combat pay to put up with the city’s problems. Those high real wages were a sign of urban failure—the painful crime rate and disintegration of urban amenities—not urban success.