Thoughts on Triumph of the City

Rohan Murdeshwar
Jul 25, 2017 · 3 min read

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. By Edward Glaeser.

“We must eschew the simplistic view that better long-distance communication will reduce our desire and need to be near one another.” As the chatter around new telecommunication technologies grows louder, Edward Glaeser may sound like a buzzkill. Electronic communication and face-to-face interaction support one another, he says. “They’re compliments rather than substitutes.” An economist, he brings data to the table: as countries urbanise they engage in more electronic communication, business air travel has taken off alongside the emergence of Skype, and people who live close to each other spend more time on the phone. Rather than make proximity irrelevant, new tech like virtual reality will make it more valuable. Gutenberg’s printing press helped people tell stories across oceans and yet the proportion of people living in close proximity has only increased since then. This time will be no different.

Image: Penguin Random House

Triumph of the City is part pop economics, part how-to guide for policy makers and urban planners. Glaeser strikes the right balance between historical narratives, personal anecdotes and data-driven insights. Throughout the book, three points stand out.

Beneath its steel and concrete skeleton lies a city’s heart: its people. A city’s key purpose is to be a tool to transfer knowledge between its residents. And a tool is only as good as the people who wield it. Educated workers bouncing ideas off each other, turning these ideas into businesses that ultimately attract more educated workers is the recipe for a thriving city. “Human capital, far more than physical infrastructure, explains which cities succeed”. Galeser does acknowledge that cities need to build in order to accommodate their growing populations. But he has recently cautioned that infrastructure investment needs to be targeted and not driven by a focus on macroeconomic effects.

Second, urbanisation’s critics often use the prevalence of poverty and urban squalor to buttress their claims that cities are cesspools. Glaeser believes they have it backwards. “Cities don’t make people poor, they attract poor people.” Cities are society’s greatest filtering mechanism — they attract poor people from villages and churn out richer and better educated citizens. This leaves urban planners in a sticky situation. By building schools and public transport systems, their efforts to improve the lives of cities’ existing poor residents will lead to an influx of even more poor people from the hinterland.

Third, skyscrapers are good for cities and great for the environment. Cities are successful because they let millions of people live on a few square kilometres of land. Shorter buildings result in fewer people living on this scarce land, driving up rent prices and making a city unaffordable for the very people it should be built for. Also, height restrictions choke a city’s lungs. Homes and offices end up being further apart than they need to be and people burn more fuel and kill more time to get from A to B.

As is common with most books of this kind, Triumph of the City is longer than it needs to be. The last chapters are repetitive and sprinkled with more examples supporting the same arguments. Glaeser is an ardent critic of suburban sprawl. He should have ensured his book wasn’t so spread out too.

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