Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 - What Do They Make in Bangalore?
CHAPTER 2 - Why Do Cities Decline?
CHAPTER 3 - What’s Good About Slums?
CHAPTER 4 - How Were the Tenements Tamed?
CHAPTER 5 - Is London a Luxury Resort?
CHAPTER 6 - What’s So Great About Skyscrapers?
CHAPTER 7 - Why Has Sprawl Spread?
CHAPTER 8 - Is There Anything Greener Than Blacktop?
CHAPTER 9 - How Do Cities Succeed?
CONCLUSION:
Acknowledgements
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
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First published in 2011 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Edward Glaeser, 2011
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Glaeser, Edward L. (Edward Ludwig),———.
Triumph of the city : how our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier / Edward L. Glaeser.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-47567-6
1. Urbanization. 2. Cities and towns—Growth. 3. Urban economics. 4. Urban sociology. I. Title.
HT361.G53 2011
307.76—dc22 2010034609
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To Nancy,
for All the Days
INTRODUCTION:
Our Urban Species
Two hundred forty-three million Americans crowd together in the 3 percent of the country that is urban. Thirty-six million people live in and around Tokyo, the most productive metropolitan area in the world. Twelve million people reside in central Mumbai, and Shanghai is almost as large. On a planet with vast amounts of space (all of humanity could fit in Texas—each of us with a personal townhouse), we choose cities. Although it has become cheaper to travel long distances, or to telecommute from the Ozarks to Azerbaijan, more and more people are clustering closer and closer together in large metropolitan areas. Five million more people every month live in the cities of the developing world, and in 2011, more than half the world’s population is urban.
Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace. The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance, and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution. The great prosperity of contemporary London and Bangalore and Tokyo comes from their ability to produce new thinking. Wandering these cities—whether down cobblestone sidewalks or grid-cutting cross streets, around roundabouts or under freeways—is to study nothing less than human progress.
In the richer countries of the West, cities have survived the tumultuous end of the industrial age and are now wealthier, healthier, and more alluring than ever. In the world’s poorer places, cities are expanding enormously because urban density provides the clearest path from poverty to prosperity. Despite the technological breakthroughs that have caused the death of distance, it turns out that the world isn’t flat; it’s paved.
The city has triumphed. But as many of us know from personal experience, sometimes city roads are paved to hell. The city may win, but too often its citizens seem to lose. Every urban childhood is shaped by an onrush of extraordinary people and experiences—some delicious, like the sense of power that comes from a preteen’s first subway trip alone; some less so, like a first exposure to urban gunfire (an unforgettable part of my childhood education in New York City thirty-five years ago). For every Fifth Avenue, there’s a Mumbai slum; for every Sorbonne, there’s a D.C. high school guarded by metal detectors.
Indeed, for many Americans, the latter half of the twentieth century—the end of the industrial age—was an education not in urban splendor but in urban squalor. How well we learn from the lessons our cities teach us will determine whether our urban species will flourish in what can be a new golden age of the city.
My passion for the urban world began with the New York of Ed Koch, Thurman Munson, and Leonard Bernstein. Inspired by my metropolitan childhood, I’ve spent my life trying to understand cities. That quest has been rooted in economic theory and data, but it has also meandered through the streets of Moscow and São Paulo and Mumbai, through the histories of bustling metropolises and the everyday stories of those who live and work in them.
I find studying cities so engrossing because they pose fascinating, important, and often troubling questions. Why do the richest and poorest people in the world so often live cheek by jowl? How do once-mighty cities fall into disrepair? Why do some stage dramatic comebacks? Why do so many artistic movements arise so quickly in particular cities at particular moments? Why do so many smart people enact so many foolish urban policies?
There’s no better place to ponder these questions than what many consider to be the archetypal city—New York. Native New Yorkers, like myself, may occasionally have a slightly exaggerated view of their city’s importance, but New York is still a paradigm of urbanity and therefore an appropriate place to start our journey to cities across the world. Its story encapsulates the past, present, and future of our urban centers, and provides a springboard for many of the themes that will emerge from the pages and places ahead.
If you stand on Forty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue this Wednesday afternoon, you’ll be surrounded by a torrent of people. Some are rushing uptown for a meeting or downtown to grab a drink. Others are walking east to enter the great subterranean caverns of Grand Central Terminal, which has more platforms than any other train station in the world. Some people may be trying
to buy an engagement ring—after all, Forty-seventh Street is the nation’s premier market for gems. There will be visitors gazing upward—something New Yorkers never do—on their way from one landmark to another. If you imitate a tourist and look up, you’ll see two great ridges of skyscrapers framing the shimmering valley that is Fifth Avenue.
Thirty years ago, New York City’s future looked far less bright. Like almost every colder, older city, Gotham seemed to be a dinosaur. The city’s subways and buses felt archaic in a world being rebuilt around the car. The city’s port, once the glory of the Eastern seaboard, had sunk into irrelevance. Under the leadership of John Lindsay and Abe Beame, the city’s government had come near default despite having some of the highest taxes in the nation. Not just Jerry Ford, but history itself seemed to be telling New York City to drop dead.
New York, or more properly New Amsterdam, was founded during an earlier era of globalization as a distant outpost of the Dutch West India Company. It was a trading village where a hodgepodge of adventurers came to make fortunes swapping beads for furs. Those mercantile Dutch settlers clustered together because proximity made it easier to exchange goods and ideas and because there was safety behind the town’s protective wall (now Wall Street).
In the eighteenth century, New York passed Boston to become the English colonies’ most important port; it specialized in shipping wheat and flour south to feed the sugar and tobacco colonies. During the first half of the nineteenth century, with business booming, New York’s population grew from sixty thousand to eight hundred thousand, and the city became America’s urban colossus.
That population explosion was partly due to changes in transportation technology. At the start of the nineteenth century, ships were generally small—three hundred tons was a normal size—and, like smaller airplanes today, ideal for point-to-point trips, like Liverpool to Charlestown or Boston to Glasgow. Between 1800 and 1850, improvements in technology and finance brought forth larger ships that could carry bigger loads at faster speeds and lower cost.
There was no percentage in having these jumbo clipper ships traveling to every point along the American coast. Just like today’s Boeing 747s, which land at major hubs and transfer their passengers onto smaller planes that take them to their final destinations, the big clipper ships came to one central harbor and then transferred their goods to smaller vessels for delivery up and down the Eastern seaboard. New York was America’s superport, with its central location, deep, protected harbor, and river access far into the hinterland. When America moved to a hub-and-spoke shipping system, New York became the natural hub. The city’s position was only strengthened when canals made Manhattan the eastern end of a great watery arc that cut through the Midwest all the way to New Orleans.
Shipping was the city’s economic anchor, but New Yorkers were more likely to work in the manufacturing industries—sugar refining, garment production, and publishing—that grew up around the harbor. Sugar producers, like the Roosevelt family, operated in a big port city, because urban scale enabled them to cover the fixed costs of big, expensive refineries and to be close enough to consumers so that refined sugar crystals wouldn’t coalesce during a long, hot water voyage. The garment industry similarly owed its concentration in New York to the vast cargoes of cotton and textiles that came through the city and sailors’ need for ready-made clothes. Even New York’s publishing preeminence ultimately reflected the city’s central place on transatlantic trade routes, as the big money in nineteenth-century books came from being the first printer out with pirated copies of English novels. The Harper brothers really arrived as publishers when they beat their Philadelphia competitors by printing the third volume of Walter Scott’s Peveril of the Peak twenty-one hours after it arrived in New York by packet ship.
In the twentieth century, however, the death of distance destroyed the transport-cost advantages that had made New York a manufacturing mammoth. Why sew skirts on Hester Street when labor is so much cheaper in China? Globalization brought fierce competition to the companies and cities that made anything that could be easily shipped across the Pacific. New York’s economic decline in the midtwentieth century reflected the increasing irrelevance of its nineteenth-century advantages.
But of course, as anyone standing on Fifth Avenue today must notice, the story didn’t end there. New York didn’t die. Today, the five zip codes that occupy the mile of Manhattan between Forty-first and Fifty-ninth streets employ six hundred thousand workers (more than New Hampshire or Maine), who earn on average more than $100,000 each, giving that tiny piece of real estate a larger annual payroll than Oregon or Nevada.
Just as globalization killed off New York’s advantages as a manufacturing hub, it increased the city’s edge in producing ideas. While there isn’t much sewing left in New York, there are still plenty of Calvin Kleins and Donna Karans, producing designs that will often be made on the other side of the planet. Honda may have brought heartache to Detroit’s Big Three, but managing the international flow of finance has earned vast sums for New York’s bankers. A more connected world has brought huge returns to the idea-producing entrepreneurs who can now scour the earth in search of profits.
New York reinvented itself during the bleak years of the 1970s when a cluster of financial innovators learned from each other and produced a chain of interconnected ideas. Academic knowledge about trading off risk and return made it easier to evaluate and sell riskier assets, like Michael Milken’s high-yield (junk) bonds, which made it possible for Henry Kravis to use those bonds to get value out of underperforming companies through leveraged buyouts. Many of the biggest innovators acquired their knowledge not through formal training but by being close to the action, like mortgage-backed security magnate Lewis Ranieri of Liar’s Poker fame, who started in the Salomon Brothers mailroom. Today, 40 percent of Manhattan’s payroll is in the financial services industry, the bulwark of a dense and still-thriving city. And even though some of these financial wizards helped give us the Great Recession, the city that housed them has weathered that storm, too. Between 2009 and 2010, as the American economy largely stagnated, wages in Manhattan increased by 11.9 percent, more than any other large county. In 2010, the average weekly wage in Manhattan was $2,404, which is 170 percent more than the U.S. average, and 45 percent more than in Santa Clara County, home of Silicon Valley, which pays the highest wages outside of Greater New York.
The rise and fall and rise of New York introduces us to the central paradox of the modern metropolis—proximity has become ever more valuable as the cost of connecting across long distances has fallen. New York’s story is unique in its operatic grandeur, but the key elements that drove the city’s spectacular rise, sad decline, and remarkable rebirth can be found in cities like Chicago and London and Milan, as well.
In this book, we’ll look closely at what makes cities our species’ greatest invention. We’ll also unpack their checkered history, which is relevant now because so many cities in the developing world struggle with the vast challenges that once plagued today’s urban stars like San Francisco, Paris, and Singapore. And we’ll examine the often surprising factors that shape the success of today’s cities—from winter temperatures to the Internet to misguided environmentalism.
Cities are the absence of physical space between people and companies. They are proximity, density, closeness. They enable us to work and play together, and their success depends on the demand for physical connection. During the middle years of the twentieth century, many cities, like New York, declined as improvements in transportation reduced the advantages of locating factories in dense urban areas. And during the last thirty years, some of these cities have come back, while other, newer cities have grown because technological change has increased the returns to the knowledge that is best produced by people in close proximity to other people.
Within the United States, workers in metropolitan areas with big cities earn 30 percent more than workers who aren’t in metropolitan areas. These high wages are offset
by higher costs of living, but that doesn’t change the fact that high wages reflect high productivity. The only reason why companies put up with the high labor and land costs of being in a city is that the city creates productivity advantages that offset those costs. Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50 percent more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas. These relationships are the same even when we take into account the education, experience, and industry of workers. They’re even the same if we take individual workers’ IQs into account. The income gap between urban and rural areas is just as large in other rich countries, and even stronger in poorer nations.
In America and Europe, cities speed innovation by connecting their smart inhabitants to each other, but cities play an even more critical role in the developing world: They are gateways between markets and cultures. In the nineteenth century, Mumbai (then called Bombay) was a gateway for cotton. In the twenty-first century, Bangalore is a gateway for ideas.
If you mentioned India to a typical American or European in 1990, chances are that person would mutter uncomfortably about the tragedy of Third World poverty. Today, that person is more likely to mutter uncomfortably about the possibility that his job might be outsourced to Bangalore. India is still poor, but it’s growing at a feverish pace, and Bangalore, India’s fifth-largest city, is among the subcontinent’s greatest success stories. Bangalore’s wealth comes not from industrial might (although it still makes plenty of textiles) but from its strength as a city of ideas. By concentrating so much talent in one place, Bangalore makes it easier for that talent to teach itself and for outsiders, whether from Singapore or Silicon Valley, to connect easily with Indian human capital.
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