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

I really wish I had liked this book, which made my read of it all the more disappointing. As somebody who has lived in cities my entire adult life, I felt that this book was going to be a great opportunity to gain some new knowledge and put some facts behind my intuition that cities are a good thing for our bodies, minds, and environment. What I found instead was a lazy, jumbled mass of stories, facts, anecdotes, and opinions bent to attribute all good things that have eve

I really wish I had liked this book, which made my read of it all the more disappointing. As somebody who has lived in cities my entire adult life, I felt that this book was going to be a great opportunity to gain some new knowledge and put some facts behind my intuition that cities are a good thing for our bodies, minds, and environment. What I found instead was a lazy, jumbled mass of stories, facts, anecdotes, and opinions bent to attribute all good things that have ever occurred in humanity to the conglomeration of people into urban spaces.

The tone right away in the first chapter turned me off to the book as a whole. It is opinion heavy, and the writing left you to assume that Glaser thinks that a) he's the first person who ever had the insight that there are inherent traits of cities that have greater value relative to suburban and rural areas, b) anybody that doesn't think that cities are the best solution when it comes to organizing people within a society is an idiot, and c) anybody who would choose to live outside of a city is an idiot. With that being said, we later find out that Glaser himself has moved to the suburbs because of the convenience of the drive to his workplace, the better schools offered by the suburbs, and the fact that he gets to have a yard. Once that admission makes it's first appearance, the rest of the book reads as his attempt to rationalize his decision and punt it to urban policymakers to improve cities in order to make people like him willing to live in them again. Especially caught in the crosshairs are the evil preservationists, who would choose to preserve the historical integrity of a city over turning over those lots to new skyscrapers so that we can keep housing prices low. There are some good points made about policymakers who confuse a city, which is a mass of connected humanity, with it's structures (e.g. failed attempts to build grand structures in Detroit to draw in urban professionals), but by the time I got to that point, I had lost interest.

The other part of this book that really annoyed me was the forced association between human innovation and cities. At points, he even came up with his own clever terms for obvious observations. For example, "self-protecting urban innovation!" Translation: people (of course, especially in cities) figure out answers to their problems. Another one, on page 32, almost made me put the book down right then, but I decided to hate-read my way through the rest of this. On page 32, Glaser makes the argument that an invention as sophisticated as the printing press couldn't have just been invented by a solitary genius. One needed financial backers, who in Glaser's world can only reside in cities because large urban markets allow for these economies of scale to flourish and rural people wouldn't put up the volume of capital necessary for such an unsure bet. Ergo, credit cities for the invention of the printing press. Without the printing press, Martin Luther wouldn't have been able to spread the message of Protestantism. And voila, you can thank cities for the Protestant Reformation. If you follow that stream of logic, you know everything you need to about this book.

In summary, if you have a friend that rags on cities and talks about the "Real America" and excludes cities from it, hide this book from them. It is exhibit A for the kind of arrogant, paternalistic, contemptuous thinking frequently found in the stereotypes draped onto city dwellers. Cities deserve better representation than this.

Cities are good for you. Cities are good for the environment. Cities are good for making money. Cities with more people per square mile are better.

So says Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser. He does have evidence; people in New York city live longer and use less energy. People in Houston, and generally in the American sunbelt, use more energy, due to a combination of lots of driving due to low density development and the constant running of air conditioners. I would note that the liv

Cities are good for you. Cities are good for the environment. Cities are good for making money. Cities with more people per square mile are better.

So says Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser. He does have evidence; people in New York city live longer and use less energy. People in Houston, and generally in the American sunbelt, use more energy, due to a combination of lots of driving due to low density development and the constant running of air conditioners. I would note that the living longer aspect has only come true in the last century or so, when most cities in rich countries provided their denizens with water without germs.

Glaeser's book is a pot pourri of different city-related subjects, such as what can be done with declining cities (not much), why poverty is so obvious in the cities of poor countries (because poor people in poor countries who move to the city are noticeably less poor than their rural counterparts), what makes for economic growth in a city, and what land use policies a city should implement.

In the American context, the main policy recommendations Glaeser makes are to eliminate such legal limitations on high density development as excessively strict zoning laws, don't enact grandiose historic preservation laws, and always remember that people can easily move outside of a city so you can't raise taxes much higher than neighboring jurisdictions. Only by allowing for high rise development can high population densities, which is associated with low energy use and economic growth, be made affordable to average people. He sees excessive zoning and historic preservation laws in New York City and central Paris as the reasons why ordinary people cannot afford to live in these desirable places. Zoning laws in suburbs often require low population densities, thus raising housing costs. Excessive zoning and other restrictions are why so much of coastal California and the northeastern United States are so expensive. These restrictions merely drive people to areas in the sunbelt without these areas, of which Houston is the quintessential example. Glaeser has a love hate attitude towards Houston, admiring the policies, or rather lack of policies, that allow for low housing prices but disliking its high energy use due to its low density. Given his approval of high density development, Glaeser would like to limit or eliminate the mortgage interest deduction on federal income taxes and stop spending so much federal infrastructure funding on highways in rural and suburban areas.