Edward Glaeser:

Additionally, there are multiple reasons to believe that cities are more environmentally sound than suburbs and country towns, and also provide better services which account for longer life expectancies. China has moved most of its population to cities because it's easier to provide services to populations concentrated in cities than to populations spread all over a vast country.

The most controversial argument of the book is that we need "smarter environmentalism", not fanatical one. He starts by noticing that people are flocking to Houston, which is not necessarily the best place to be. Houston is affordable and has low taxes, unlike California and New York, so that explains. However, people in Houston need to use the car because it's a spread-out city. Houston is more affordable than California and New York because Houston has fewer regulations and therefore can build more housing to match demand, whereas in California a jungle of regulations makes it difficult to build, housing demand vastly exceeds housing supply, and housing prices skyrocket. Glaeser turns this point around: the regulations of California's cities aimed at protecting the environment cause homes to be too expensive, therefore people move to places like Houston where those people need to use a car and need air conditioning and heating because of the extreme weather. The shortage of homes in places like the Bay Area is due to regulation, not to nature. The Bay Area could build a lot more homes if it destroyed its protected parks and wildlife areas, and a lot of people would prefer to live in those homes than in Houston, and their "carbon footprint" would be smaller. Protecting nature indirectly causes people to move to places where they cause damage to the environment. In general, if cities had fewer regulations and allowed for more density of buildings, housing would be cheaper and people didn't move to more affordable suburbs, where their "carbon footprint" is much higher. Living in a "concrete jungle" is more ecologically friendly than living in a spread-out suburb and way more environmentally friendly than living in the countryside. Glaeser quotes David Owen's book "Green Metropolis" and his own essay "Green Cities, Brown Suburbs". By opposing the growth of cities, California environmentalists are actually causing more damage to the environment elsewhere. Glaeser points out that the typical review of a building project consists in examining the impact of the project if it's approved, but not the impact that canceling the project will have somewhere else. Inevitably, Glaeser loves Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London in 2000-08 who launched several development projects to make London denser and more vertical. People who live in low-density regions are forced to drive a lot and have big houses that are expensive to cool and heat.

Cities have also been "engines of innovation" since immemorial time. Glaeser quotes Jane Jacobs, who wrote in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961) and "The Economy of Cities" (1969) that new ideas are formed by combining old ideas and this is more likely to take place in cities than in sparsely populated countrysides. Glaeser argued that, historically, agriculture was invented after people started congregating in cities where trade in animals and plants led to husbandry and agriculture.

Glaeser argues that cities are better at reinventing economies as times change. For example, there was a moment when the rise of fast and cheap transportation (ships, railways and airplanes) made it less important (and in fact detrimental) to place factories in cities: it was more effective to locate them where salaries were lower and buildings were cheaper. Nonetheless the richest places in the world are still cities like New York, Hong Kong and London.

Glaeser, writing before the covid pandemic, mentions the paradox that proximity has become more important despite the fact that distances have become shorter thanks to faster transportation (not to mention virtual movement of information replacing the physical movement of people).

Not much has actually changed since medieval times: cities have lost the manufacturing but have become centers of shopping and entertainment, just like medieval towns rose and prospered as centers of trade and entertainment.

Glaeser also gives us an introduction to urban studies, ranging from the early skyscrapers to suburban developments like New York's Levittown and Houston's Woodlands.

It is an interesting observation that, until very recent times, almost all cities were built on waterways: it was cheaper to ship goods on a river to a distant town than to carry them on carriages to the next town, and it was cheaper to ship goods across the Atlantic ocean than to ship them a short distance inland in the USA.

Glaeser does mention that cities come with a price, notably higher crime (and we would also add pollution, sedentary lifestyle, stress, social isolation and so on). This book was written before the covid pandemic so it didn't occur to the author that cities are "mass spreaders" of viruses. Covid would have been a very different thing if people were not concentrated in giant cities like Wuhan, Milan and New York (the first three places to suffer thousands of deaths).

Glaeser focuses a lot on Detroit. All the other major cities of the 1950s are still prospering and prove his point that cities are able to renew themselves. But he has to explain why Detroit instead decayed so much so quickly. Detroit is probably the only major example in the USA of a big city that used to be rich and now it's poor. Detroit's population increased rapidly after Detroit became a transit point of goods between the Great Prairies and the cities of the East Coast. In 1872 Detroit Dry Docks began producing engines for ships. One man who worked for Dry Docks was Henry Ford, who then worked for the electrical giants Westinghouse and Edison. In 1950 Detroit was the fifth largest city in the USA (but not in America, contrary to what Glaeser says: Sao Paulo in Brazil, Mexico City in Mexico and Lima in Peru were already bigger - the USA is not the whole of America). Between 1950 and 2008 Detroit lost more than half its population. In 2008 Detroit had one of the highest murder rates in the USA, more than ten times higher than New York But the assembly line is a knowledge-destroying idea: it employs workers who need to have no skills and no education. High productivity is achieved at the expense of reducing knowledge among the labor force. Overall the city becomes less "skilled", less educated and less creative. Glaeser compares it with the situations of Boston, where maritime trade declined sharply after the invention of the steamship, and of New York, where garment business declined sharply in the 1970s: neither events caused the collapse of either city because the cities contained plenty of knowledge to invent new kinds of business. Glaeser certainly has a good point, but anyone who worked in an assembly chain knows that even the assembly chain requires skilled laborers, so it remains a mystery in Glaeser's narrative why those skilled laborers didn't invent something new. I would look at the importance of venture capital more seriously. And i would look at the importance of art and science. In the 1960s San Francisco was poor and technologically backwards compared to Detroit but it had plenty of creativity in art and culture. It did make a difference. Boston and New York always had vibrant cultural and artistic lives, certainly a lot more than Detroit.

The other weak point in Glaeser's argument is Silicon Valley, a network of spread-out cities made of low buildings with really bad public transportation where the car is essential. Silicon Valley is slowly becoming a metropolis but it certainly wasn't a "city" when it first boomed. It mostly had orchards. It owes its existence to the spread of suburbia. It is an aberration by the standards of Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", that celebrated the pedestrian world of the old cities: there are no pedestrians in Silicon Valley. To this day anyone coming from New York suffers a culture shock. San Francisco became rich after (not before) Silicon Valley.

Glaeser, writing in 2011, predicted that Silicon Valley would be "hurt by concentrating too much on a single industry". The mistake was in thinking that the electronic industry is a "single industry". It's like saying that anything that uses pen and paper is a single industry. Glaeser missed the fact that the electronic industry was a vast new economy containing within itself countless different industries, starting with the division of hardware and software, and then within software of all sorts of software applications, from e-commerce to biotech. One can't compare making cars in Detroit (a single industry that enabled the growth of several other industries in other places) with making chips in Silicon Valley (the chip being merely the enabler for a number of industries that will be located in the same place). Lesson learned: first you have to define "industry".

The weakest points of Glaeser's argument, though, is his own analysis of cities that "succeeded": Tokyo, Singapore, Gaborone, Boston, Minneapolis, Milan, Dubai and Chicago. These analyses are not only short and superficial but also vague and contradictory. Those cities have little in common and sometimes they followed completely opposite paths (eg Tokyo and Milan). Clearly each city has its own local, historical and cultural identity, which makes each city a completely different laboratory from the others. No rule can be applied blindly to a city Singapore is a city-state and an island, Milan is a hub of fashion, Boston has a lot of universities, Vancouver has a large foreign-born population, Dubai is an Islamic dictatorship that likes to build skyscrapers, and Chicago had a mayor who did the opposite of what Boston, New York and California did (he encouraged construction). It remains a mystery if there are any general rules.

One can agree with his general argument that "cities are green" (or, better, "greener" than suburbs) but his prescriptions for "success" are confusing and, ultimately, non-existent.