Survival of the City

*Expansive and entertaining. . . . [A] fast-paced and highly readable journey . . . the book serves as a useful tool in the effort to redefine the role of the city in an age of increasingly polarized politics, and reminds us that urban health is as Fiorello La Guardia once remarked about cleaning the streets not a Democratic or Republican issue. New York Times Book Review*

One of our great urbanists and one of our great public health experts join forces to reckon with how cities are changing in the face of existential threats the pandemic has only accelerated**

Cities can make us sick. That s always been true diseases spread more easily when more people are close to one another. And cities have been demonized as breeding grounds for vice and crime from Sodom and Gomorrah on. But cities have flourished nonetheless because they are humanity s greatest invention, indispensable engines for creativity, innovation, wealth, and civilization itself.

But cities now stand at a crossroads. During the global COVID crisis, cities grew silent; the normal forms of socializing ground to a halt. How permanent are these changes? Advances in technology mean that many people can opt out of city life as never before. Will they? Are we on the brink of a post-urban world?

City life will survive, but individual cities face terrible risks, argue Edward Glaeser and David Cutler, and a wave of urban failure would be absolutely disastrous. In terms of intimacy and inspiration, nothing can replace what cities offer. But great cities have always demanded great management, and our current crisis has exposed fearful gaps in our capacity for good governance. In America, Glaeser and Cutler argue, deep inequities in health care and education are a particular blight on the future of our cities; solving them will be the difference between our collective good health and a downward spiral to a much darker place.

Autorentext

Edward Glaeser and David Cutler

Klappentext

One of our great urbanists and one of our great public health experts join forces to reckon with how cities are changing in the face of existential threats the pandemic has only accelerated

Cities can make us sick. That's always been true-diseases spread more easily when more people are close to one another. And cities have been demonized as breeding grounds for vice and crime from Sodom and Gomorrah on. But cities have flourished nonetheless because they are humanity's greatest invention, indispensable engines for creativity, innovation, wealth, and civilization itself.

But cities now stand at a crossroads. During the global COVID crisis, cities grew silent; the normal forms of socializing ground to a halt. How permanent are these changes? Advances in technology mean that many people can opt out of city life as never before. Will they? Are we on the brink of a post-urban world?

City life will survive, but individual cities face terrible risks, argue Edward Glaeser and David Cutler, and a wave of urban failure would be absolutely disastrous. In terms of intimacy and inspiration, nothing can replace what cities offer. But great cities have always demanded great management, and our current crisis has exposed fearful gaps in our capacity for good governance. In America, Glaeser and Cutler argue, deep inequities in health care and education are a particular blight on the future of our cities; solving them will be the difference between our collective good health and a downward spiral to a much darker place.

Leseprobe

Chapter 1

The City Besieged

Cities can die. Earthquake and invasion doomed Knossos, the mighty Cretan city that housed the mythic minotaur. Cities often decline. Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Liverpool are all far smaller today than they were in the 1930s. Urban triumph is never guaranteed.

The decline of a city is a terrible thing to watch. It might begin with a factory closing. Some of the factory's workers then cut back on spending at local stores; other workers, those with the most education and opportunities, leave the city altogether. The tax base declines, and the city both raises its taxes and cuts its spending on police, schools, and parks. Crime increases. New businesses stay away. More people leave. Economic trouble begets social trouble, which begets more economic trouble.

For the past half century, urban decline has mostly come from deindustrialization, the exodus of factory jobs from erstwhile municipal powerhouses like Detroit and Glasgow. That crisis occurred because urban density no longer offered much of an advantage to massive, self-contained, highly automated manufacturing plants. But uncontrolled pandemic is an even more existential threat to the urban world, because the human proximity that enables contagion is the defining characteristic of the city.

If cities are the absence of physical space between people, then the social distancing that began in March 2020 is the rapid-fire deurbanization of our world. Data from cellular phones, provided by SafeGraph, shows that the number of trips Americans took for recreation and shopping dropped by 40 percent between March 14 and March 24 of 2020.

A pandemic that travels by air poses a threat not only to urban health but also to the urban service economy that provides jobs for most modern city dwellers. For workers without an advanced degree, the ability to serve coffee with a smile provided an economic safe haven after the factories mechanized and left once wealthy metropolises. Those jobs seemed safe because no matter how much we globalize, fresh lattes will never be exported from China to Soho.

When that barista's smile becomes a source of peril rather than pleasure, those jobs can vanish in a heartbeat. Before the 2020 pandemic, 32 million Americans, or twenty percent of the employed labor force, worked in retail trade, leisure, and hospitality. One fifth of America's leisure and hospitality jobs vanished between November 2019 and November 2020. Between the third quarter of 2019 and the third quarter of 2020, UK employment in accommodation and food services declined by more than 14 percent, and 22 percent of those who still have jobs in the sector are on some kind of furlough. If all of the world's face-to-face service jobs permanently disappear, the results will be catastrophic, both for cities and for the global economy.

The irony of our pre-2020 complacency toward pandemic risk is that the triumph of the city owes much to victories over prior plagues. The semi-urban inhabitants of the first human settlements were less healthy than their hunter-gatherer ancestors, partially because communicable disease deaths were more common in denser areas. Cities long depended on net migration from the countryside to replace their dead. But by 1940, vaccination, sewers, and antibiotics allowed life expectancy in urban areas to catch up to rural life expectancy. By 2020, urbanites lived longer than people in rural areas, and that mortality gap was growing-at least before the reappearance of mass contagion.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 is unlikely to be a one-time event, unless governments take pandemic preparedness far more seriously. As global mobility has grown, actual or potential pandemics have become more common. Between 1900 and 1980, only a few outbreaks threatened all of the United States: the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, the Asian flu (1957-58), and the Hong Kong flu (1968). The first of these was terrible, but our memory of it dimmed over time. Since the 1980s, the country has experienced HIV/AIDS (1980s-present), the H1N1 flu (2009), the Zika virus (2015-16), and now SARS-CoV-2 (2020), which we will hereafter refer to as COVID-19, the disease it causes. COVID-19 is itself the third in a series of coronaviruses to jump from bats to humans, following SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012. Then t…