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

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

Edward L. Glaeser

Language: English

Pages: 352

ISBN: 159420277X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


A pioneering urban economist offers fascinating, even inspiring proof that the city is humanity's greatest invention and our best hope for the future.

America is an urban nation. More than two thirds of us live on the 3 percent of land that contains our cities. Yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, crime ridden, expensive, environmentally unfriendly... Or are they?

As Edward Glaeser proves in this myth-shattering book, cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and richest (in cultural and economic terms) places to live. New Yorkers, for instance, live longer than other Americans; heart disease and cancer rates are lower in Gotham than in the nation as a whole. More than half of America's income is earned in twenty-two metropolitan areas. And city dwellers use, on average, 40 percent less energy than suburbanites.

Glaeser travels through history and around the globe to reveal the hidden workings of cities and how they bring out the best in humankind. Even the worst cities-Kinshasa, Kolkata, Lagos- confer surprising benefits on the people who flock to them, including better health and more jobs than the rural areas that surround them. Glaeser visits Bangalore and Silicon Valley, whose strangely similar histories prove how essential education is to urban success and how new technology actually encourages people to gather together physically. He discovers why Detroit is dying while other old industrial cities-Chicago, Boston, New York-thrive. He investigates why a new house costs 350 percent more in Los Angeles than in Houston, even though building costs are only 25 percent higher in L.A. He pinpoints the single factor that most influences urban growth-January temperatures-and explains how certain chilly cities manage to defy that link. He explains how West Coast environmentalists have harmed the environment, and how struggling cities from Youngstown to New Orleans can "shrink to greatness." And he exposes the dangerous anti-urban political bias that is harming both cities and the entire country.

Using intrepid reportage, keen analysis, and eloquent argument, Glaeser makes an impassioned case for the city's import and splendor. He reminds us forcefully why we should nurture our cities or suffer consequences that will hurt us all, no matter where we live.

The Surprising Design of Market Economies

Market Economics and Political Change: Comparing China and Mexico

Critical Realism in Economics: Development and Debate (Economics as Social Theory)

The Varieties of Economic Rationality: From Adam Smith to Contemporary Behavioural and Evolutionary Economics (Routledge Studies in the History of Economics)

Intellectual Property and Theories of Justice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Bangalore doesn’t mean that all cities will succeed. In 1950, Detroit was America’s fifth-largest city and had 1.85 million people. In 2008, it had 777 thousand people, less than half its former size, and was continuing to lose population steadily. Eight of the ten largest American cities in 1950 have lost at least a fifth of their population since then. The failure of Detroit and so many other industrial towns doesn’t reflect any weakness of cities as a whole, but rather the sterility of those

shocked by famine or civil war or, very rarely, something as helpful as the Green Revolution—while the part of the world that is urban and poor is changing rapidly. There is opportunity in change. But there is a reason why people promote the myth that cities are bad for the poor. The flow of millions of poor people into cities may be a hopeful sign for those migrants, but it won’t necessarily improve the quality of life for the middle-income people who are already living in those areas. Policies

nature in order to put bread on their tables. But as the world grew wealthier over the nineteenth century, an increasingly large segment of the population came to want a little green mixed in with the urban density. Open spaces offered a bit of relief from the foul air and water of the early industrial cities. Historically, the wealthy managed to combine city and country by having two homes. Winter months were spent in the city. In the hot summers, when disease spread most virulently, the

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