Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a book I thought I would love, but as I read it I began wishing there was another, tighter, more focused book I could be reading.

The book is pacted with factoids, most of the post hoc ergo propter hoc type, but, for me at least, it doesn't really gel as a convincing, connected argument. There are points made that make sense - some cities have a lot of poverty because they attract poor people seeking opportunity, cities with diverse economic bases are less susceptible to an economic shock linked to the decline of single industry, it's good for cities to have strong educational institutions, that London is a fun place helps make it attractive as a place to live for skilled professionals, skyscrapers are an efficient way to house businesses and people, there are still advantages to be had in close physical proximity. Some of these points are old hat; some are relatively fresh and even against the received wisdom.

For an awful lot of these points, though, the ultimate response is: So What? The whole seemed like a lot less than the sum of the parts. The experience was less like reading a focused essay than browsing through Google news or an RSS feed on cities - a lot of information, somewhat organized, but nothing like an actionable vision. At times the data triumphantly trotted out was inconsistent (Silicon Valley succeeds as a kind of city, dispersed into office parks thought it be; Route 128 failed because being dispersed into office parks as it is it lacked the physical connections of a true city). At times, it fails to grapple with the implications of the obvious (yes, the theater in London or New York is great, but the seats are often filled with tourists because the locals are too busy working to make it). More often, the arguments make a kind of superficial sense (when the big three went down in Detroit, the economic monoculture built up around cars was incapable of spawning replacement industries) but seem less clear upon reflection (why could none of the thousands of supplier firms, from ad agencies to banks to muffler makers to makers of industrial robots, that clustered around Detroit migrate into new businesses? Surely there were opportunities for these suppliers outside the auto industry, so we are left wondering).

He makes the point, surely a valid one, that cities are ultimately about people, not structures, but doesn't deal adequately with the nuances and subtleties of the institutions and social structures that draw people to cities and keep them there. It requires way more than observing that London has good theater and excellent restaurants to explain why people and businesses cluster there, as they do, despite the expense and the awful climate.

Living in a new (30 years) city of 15 million people, next to an older (150 years) city of 10 million that has been totally transformed in the past fifty years, has made me very interested in what makes cities grow and become great. From this book, I got a lot of factoids and references to other people's work. If Glaeser has a synthesized vision, it's lost in the flood of seemingly unconnected data (or perhaps the decision was made to serve up a low fiber buffet of canapes for a mass audience instead of really working through things for those willing to think it through). It's not an awful book, but given Glaeser's academic work and background it is so much less than it could be.

Producing a comprehensive and entertaining book on cities' value to society requires a scholar with a lifelong urban devotion whose background and skills cut across traditional social science disciplines. Fortunately, the world has Ed Glaeser. Each of Glaeser's chapters seamlessly blends historical narrative, present day travelogue, history of urban thought, rigorous empirical research, and policy prescription. By presenting each of these well, he produces a convincing polemic. As more academic economists begin to popularize their research, Glaeser is distinguished in both the quality of his scholarship and the importance of his subject to society.

Much of Glaeser's work is refuting conventional wisdom against cities: we learn urban life can be green, skyscrapers need not destroy local character, congestion ills can be solved, and inner-city education need not be dreadful. Glaeser does not have all the answers to the problems he addresses, and occasionally his arguments are weak. But what fun is reading about a subject with nothing left to debate?

Glaeser is most convincing on one central policy theme: inept government makes urban living less accessible than it should be. These policies include overzealous historical preservation and height limits, subsidization of home ownership and auto travel, oversupply of public infrastructure, various forms of NIMBYism, and the more complex failures surrounding urban education. These issues touched Glaeser deeply as the tilted landscape led him to pick suburban life for his own children.

The book's subtitle could use clarification. Glaeser is not arguing that everyone will be happier in cities. He is not merely trying to impose nostalgia for his NYC upbringing on the world: as he says, "one's own tastes are rarely a sound basis for public policy." Glaeser's urban advocacy is evidence-based. Cities are the incubators for economic growth, and throughout history the innovation arising from cities has improved standard of living even for those choosing to avoid them.

This is two really wonderful books and one less wonderful book all wrapped into one.

The first book, which is terrific, is a brisk and accessible tour through a series of real-life experiments deeply grounded in data: "A study of corruption in Indonesia found that the stock prices of companies whose leaders stood closest to that country's dictator in photographs suffered most when the leader fell ill."

More: "When American cities have built new rapid-transit stops over the last thirty years, poverty rates have generally increased near those stops." It's not that transit stops cause poverty, he explains; rather, poor people value being able to get to work without the expense of owning a car.

That insight, like many of those mentioned by Professor Glaeser, bears on the main topic of his book, the economics of cities. The author proves useful as a guide to the research of others as well as in conveying his own thoughts. "Nathaniel Baum-Snow, a Brown University economist, has calculated that each new highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18 percent." And, "Dartmouth economist Bruce Sacerdote found that children displaced from New Orleans by Katrina had a significant improvement in their test scores. He found the biggest beneficiaries of the exodus were children from poorly performing schools who left the New Orleans area altogether." It's the counterintuitive nature of these insights that makes them particularly delicious -- that expensive highway project that the local congressman fought to get funded turns out to be bad for his city, and Hurricane Katrina turns out to have been a good thing for the education of its "victims."

The second excellent book within Triumph of a City documents the way that regulations prevent cities from accommodating the needs of people. "Too much preservation stops cities from providing newer, taller, better buildings for their inhabitants," he writes.

Historic preservation laws are just one part of a set of barriers to building that also includes zoning, environmental laws, and government approval processes. "Over the past forty years, we've experienced a little-remarked revolution in property rights in America," Professor Glaeser writes. "We have gone from a system wherein people could essentially do what they wanted with their own property to a system wherein neighbors have enormous power to restrict growth and change."

The strength of the first two books makes the weakness of the third book contained within Triumph of the City all the more disappointing. This third book-within-a-book consists of a series of left-wing assumptions.

The problems of cities, Professor Glaeser insists, won't be solved by "mindlessly relying on the free market." In fact, he says, "there's no free-market solution for the great urban problem facing slums....Cities desperately need forceful, capable governments to provide clean water." He doesn't mention that here in America, private water systems produce 4.6 billion gallons of water a day, or about 1.7 trillion gallons per year. Or that the private drinking water business is a $4.3 billion per year business, with at least 12 publicly traded companies among the players (more if you count bottled water).

Professor Glaeser has a strange crush on the French school system. "If America imitated the best aspect of European socialism and invested enough in public schools so that they were all good, then there would be little reason for the rich to leave cities to get better schooling," he writes. Later, he repeats, "If the United States emulated France and embraced nationwide quality schooling funded by the state, there would be less reason to flee urban areas."

In fact the 2009 results from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment, which studies 15-year-olds, found that America outperformed France in reading and science. France did better than America in math, but is that a reason for America to emulate or embrace an educational system that in two of three categories measured produced worse results than ours? The latest UNESCO statistics also show that the United States outspent France on primary education, as measured by annual public expenditure per primary student as a percentage of GDP per capita.

The sections devoted to global warming veer into self-righteousness. "Anyone who believes that global warming is a real danger should see dense urban living as part of the solution....The polar ice caps appear to be melting quickly and threatening seaside cities from New York to Hong Kong with the prospect of severe flooding," he writes. "For the sake of humanity and our planet, cities are -- and must be -- the wave of the future."

It's not just cities that Professor Glaeser has in mind for his project of saving "humanity and our planet" but also taxes. "Current U.S. gas taxes are too low," he insists. "Throughout the world, we can adopt a global emissions tax that charges people for the damage done by their carbon emissions. The actual size of the tax needs to be worked out by the experts...."

Toward the end of the book, he writes, in arguing for more stimulus spending to be directed at cities: "The five least dense states managed to sit out the recession with an average unemployment rate of 6.4 percent, as of December 2009." For a book whose whole argument is "the power of proximity" in cities to create wealth, jobs, and growth, that's a fact that undercuts the author's argument, and one wishes Professor Glaeser would at least try to explain it. He does not.

Professor Glaeser is also not always as clear as one would wish in terms of his definition of a city. Is it the whole metropolitan statistical area, or just what lies within the municipal boundaries? Sometimes cities and suburbs have similar characteristics in terms of density, they just lie on opposite sides of political boundaries. If cities make us "richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier," as the book's subtitle claims, would just expanding some political boundaries help? Or is density all that is required, and, if so, why aren't dense suburbs just as good as cities?

Professor Glaeser himself, who grew up in Manhattan, moved his family to the suburbs of Boston, a decision about which in the book he expresses a certain amount of ambivalence and, perhaps even guilt. He seems to want an increased gas tax and a lower home mortgage tax deduction to make it more cost-sensible for him to live in the city, but those may strike Americans who don't share Mr. Glaeser's taste for cities as high prices to impose.

Disclosures: I was sent a free copy of this book by the Manhattan Institute, where Professor Glaeser is a fellow. Professor Glaeser was a frequent contributor to the New York Sun when I was its managing editor, though I don't recall ever dealing with him directly.

Professor Glaeser's book on urban life offers fascinating and fresh perspectives. Both liberals and conservatives will find some of their views challlenged. Both sides will emerge from this tour de force wiser. Many who view metropolitan life with scepticism and even hostility will look on cities more kindly. Those who have always loved cities will find new reasons to do so. Generally, I find his style very accessible and entertaining. He manages to translate complex economics into fascinating insights for non-economist readers like me. With Triumph of the City, which is both educational and a great read, he has definitely entered the realm of top-notch popular economics!

Triumph of the City argues that cities are humanity's greatest invention: centers of collaboration, innovation, culture, and even pleasure. Professor Glaeser, an economist, recounts the history of many cities/metropolitan areas across continents and eras, including New York, Detroit, Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Singapore, Tokyo, and more. In many cases, these cities started as transportation hubs, transformed into manufacturing centers, and either declined or further transformed into innovation centers and consumer centers.

Glaeser presents both the upsides and downsides of cities, supported by many economic studies. On the positive side, population density is correlated with productivity and wage growth. Cities are markets for both labor and for finding mates. Cities provide the critical mass to support museums, the arts, entertainment, and restaurants. City residents are significantly more energy efficient. On the negative side, density also can lead to disease, crime, problematic schools, and long commutes. He argues that governments at both local and national levels need to aggressively address these negatives to promote cities and their benefits.

Along with this, he suggests several policy prescriptions, which are not exclusively left or right wing, but more generally in favor of productivity and against economic distortion. The expensive areas of Boston, New York, California, and Mumbai are expensive because the supply is artificially constrained by regulation (such as building height limitations, minimum lot sizes, and preservation), not by space. Glaeser is in favor of charging for externalities - costs inflicted on others - such as congestion pricing and a carbon tax. He is opposed to the mortgage tax deduction in the US, which biases people towards homeownership and against cities, where most people rent. He is in favor of either nationalized education or charter schools. And he is against big urban renewal policies such as rebuilding New Orleans, because cities rise and fall due to people, not due to buildings and infrastructure.

Glaeser makes a strong argument that cities have been a key part of our past, and an even bigger part of our future.

I guess that perhaps this book is targeted for a more general audience, but it's a real disappointment to those of us who actually work in the field of planning or urban affairs. First, the author doesn't seem to have done much in the way of original research - there are a lot of anecdotes from trips he made to Mumbai, London and Paris, but not much in the way of interviews with residents, leaders, planners, architects or businesspeople. His chapter on Houston fails to address that the reason people move there is that the city has plenty of jobs due to the fact that it's the center of the oil services industry, mainly because Texas and the Gulf are major oil producing centers, and have been for a century (see: Edmonton as well for this phenomenon). Unfortunately, Glaeser falls into Joel Kotkin territory here, drawing conclusions first and then seeking to support them later. His suggestion that there should be a cap on the number of buildings a city can landmark is absurd, and more arbitrary and ridiculous than the present system.

I would guess that it's probably a 3 star book for those who aren't on familiar ground, but compared to a book like Joel Garreau's remarkable "Edge City" - which was an amazing and revealing work when released - it really falls short.

Ed Glaeser's Triumph of the City manages to combine his extensive work as a pre-eminent mind in urban economics, microeconomics and political economy with his passion for history, sociology and literature. It is hard to describe this book as a book about urban economics any more so than the Ascent of Money is about finance - its sweep is so broad and much as Fergusson's book show that finance and exchange underly what civilization is it is hard to put down this book and think that cities are anything else but civilization in physical form.

In a broad sweep from Bangalore to Rio to Detroit and always back to New York (Ed is a born and bred New Yorker) the book draws on economic history, recent economic literature (much of which is Ed's work) and sociology to weave together the importance of cities as centers of economic, technological and social change and innovation.

As a read I think this book strikes a nice balance between the self-conscious regression citing ways of Freakonomics but with a bit more intellectual rigor than Fergusson's broad sweep of history. It is a triumph to strike the balance so well and be able to entertain equally well a "history" audience as well as people who are more practically concerned with cities in economics, urban planning and policy.

This work is sadly uneven. It does include refreshing, well supported, original ideas concerning the crucial role of urban life in our economies and civilizations. The outlook is international and discusses cities on many continents. Fascinating analogies are made through time and space, for instance between 21st century Rio and 19th century New York and Boston.

Unfortunately, some frequent repetitions and an imperfect structure show that indeed this book is largely a collage of opinions published previously in blogs and articles, as the author admits in the acknowledgements section.
Worse, certain positions are very poorly founded. For example, the book presents a naive and simplistic view of zoning based on supply and demand that excludes realities such as corruption and speculation.

Though the author tries to temper things with historical research and his own field observations, there is generally too much reliance on statistics and numerical data. This is often more confusing than convincing as illustrated by statements such as : `Holding family income and size constant, gas consumption per family per year declines by 106 gallons as the number of residents per square mile doubles'.

The author includes many self-deprecating comments, describing himself for instance as socially awkward and athletically incompetent. He does not avoid however a certain degree of narcissism and recounts his youth in New York (at 69th Street and 1st Avenue), his current suburban life in Massachusetts, his great grandmother's prayers in Trinity Church, his grandfather's emigration from Germany in 1930, etc. This does not succeed in humanizing the book but rather diminishes the objectivity expected from a Harvard professor.

Finally, the book's lay-out is disappointingly old-fashioned with a short series of black and white illustrations grouped together in the middle of the book.

Despite its shortcomings, this book definitely contributes to the debate launched 50 years ago by Jane Jacobs regarding the importance of dense, diversified and efficient cities and is warmly recommended to all concerned with urban, economic and social development issues.

Glaeser writes clearly and succinctly and he is obviously intelligent. I thought, however, based on the title and product descriptions that the emphasis of this work was the city itself. Unfortunately, Gleaser used the book as a forum to pound away at what I would consider a libertarian political ideology. He wasn't subtle about it and, like most adherents to a particular "ism" (e.g. capitalism, socialism, religious fundamentalism, communism...) he cherry-picked his examples to ram home his particular point of view while conveniently ignoring equally valid counter examples. This political spin detracted from what could have been a wonderful exploration of the history, the strengths, the achievements, and the challenges of this, one of humanity's most remarkable developments. There was enough interesting and non-political material to keep me engaged, and I don't regret buying or reading the book. My feeling was that the work, had Glaeser been able to check his ideology at the door, could have been so much more than it was.

In this excellent book, Harvard economist Ed Glaeser explains the economic benefits of cities. Glaeser theorizes that cities (broadly defined to include suburban areas like Silicon Valley) are more economically productive than small towns because of the advantages of proximity - that is, people learn from each other, and learn more and innovate more when they have the opportunity for face-to-face contact. He backs this up not only by pointing out that bigger cities tend to have higher GNPs, but by a common-sense argument: given that cities have higher costs, why else would companies locate in them? Some of the other questions Glaeser addresses include:

*Why do some cities thrive while others fail? He looks at New York and Detroit, suggesting that New York had two advantages. First, employment in Detroit was more centralized in a few major firms (the "Big Three" automakers) so people couldn't jump from job to job, learning new skills and forming spin-off companies. By contact, New York's financial industry is less centralized. Second, Detroit's workforce was less educated, and thus could not innovate as easily. Glaeser backs up his argument with one interesting fact: the cities with the highest number of firms per worker generally had higher employment growth in the late 20th century than cities with fewer firms per worker (i.e. more centralized economies).

*Why hasn't the Internet caused more decentralization? Glaeser suggests that high-skill jobs benefit more from face-to-face proximity. Indeed, the internet actually encourages face-to-face proximity, because people who "meet" online may eventually want to meet in person, just as people who meet by phone eventually want to meet in person.

*Why are big cities more sharply divided into rich and poor than smaller ones? On the one hand, the economic advantages of cities can create economic stars, thus increasing the number of rich. On the other hand, the huge job base of cities encourages people from rural areas and other nations to move to cities, thus increasing the number of poor. Although Third World slums may be miserable by our standards, they are still more prosperous than the villages that export people to those slums.

*How much government does a city need to prosper? Glaeser is neither a strict libertarian nor a conventional liberal. He argues that cities very much need law enforcement, transportation facilities (so their goods can reach the hinterland) and clean water. Why water? Because water-born diseases were a major killer in 19th century America, and clean water enabled people to live in cities without risking death from cholera and similar epidemics. In fact, today's cities can be healthier than their rural counterparts: Manhattanites between 25 and 34 have a 60% lower death rate than other Americans of that age, because fewer cars mean fewer car crashes, and for some reason suicides are less common as well. The gap narrows but does not completely disappear for older Americans. (Having said that, I wish that here, and elsewhere in the book, Glaeser had studied a broader range of cities and added a wider selection of statistics).

*Why are some cities more expensive than others? Glaeser suggests that land use regulation is more extensive in expensive cities, leading to fewer building permits and thus to higher prices. For example, Manhattan allowed 11,000 building permits per year between 1955 and 1964, but only 3120 per year in the 1980s and 90s. Similarly, Santa Clara County (Sillicon Valley) has high prices in part because between 2001 and 2008, it allowed only one new home for every 50 acres, while low-price Houston allowed one per five acres.

Glaeser has gotten a lot of flak for defending skyscrapers and criticizing historic preservation. But I think his critics misconstrue his argument. He isn't saying that 40-story buidings are the only way to supply affordable housing; rather, he is arguing that housing will be affordable if more of it is built somewhere in a city- whether by making more tall buildings or by making a larger number of not-so-tall buildings.