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20 Dec 07

How Should We Be Thinking About Urbanization? A Freakonomics Quorum - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

A "quorum of smart thinkers" discusses what problems and opportunities majority urbanism presents, "What effects has it had on our local and global culture? Economy? Health?"

freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/...nization-a-freakonomics-quorum - Preview

alan_berube cities dolores_hayden edward_glaeser freakonomics innovation james_kunstler opinion robert_bruegmann urban_development

Most observers tend to extrapolate current trends and assume that what we see now will continue moving in the same direction — ever-larger cities, etc. I don’t see it that way. The global energy predicament now gathering around us will synergize with climate change to produce a very different outcome.
- - of course he has to say that, since he has staked his speaking career on "the long emergency"...
  - Kunstler drives me nuts. - on 2007-12-20
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Some of our cities will not make it. Phoenix, Tucson, and other Sunbelt cities will dry up and blow away. In Las Vegas, the excitement will be over. Other mega-cities will have to downscale or face extreme dysfunction.
- - it's obvious that he used to write science fiction, too - on 2007-12-20
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- The suburbs, for the most part, are toast. They have three possible outcomes in the twenty-first century: as slums, salvage yards, or ruins.
  - - see previous comment - on 2007-12-20
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- Edward Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard and director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Kennedy School of Government:
  - - his entire text is worth highlighting! - on 2007-12-20
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- A central paradox of the twenty-first century is that declining communication and transportation costs have made cities more vital than ever.
  - - I wonder how the declining transportation costs aspect would sit with Kunstler, who would presumably counter with "just you wait, that'll be over soon"... - on 2007-12-20
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- In the developing world, cities are the intellectual gateways between the human capital of India and China and the markets of the West. In the developed world, cities have enjoyed a remarkable resurgence over the last 25 years as the density that once made it easier to move hogsheads onto clipper ships now serves to spread knowledge in finance and new technology.
- Globalization and the death of distance increased the returns for being smart, and you become smart by hanging out with smart people. As such, cities remain important because they create the intellectual connections that forge human capital and spur innovation.
  - - an important aspect here is that "smart" also means smart in different ways, and as Aristotle said (paraphrase): a city is composed of many different kinds of people (ok, he said men, but we mean people), and it's that rubbing up against difference (and tolerance) that makes cities so very valuable.
    - disagreement is good - on 2007-12-20
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- Cities sometimes have a bad reputation because of their association with problems like poverty, pollution, and disease; but this association does not imply causation.
  
  Cities are full of poor people because cities attract poor people, not because cities make people poor. Millions of the least advantaged come to urban areas not because cities are bad for them, but because cities are good for them.
  - - exactly! Or, in the West's case, because the poor can expect to access services that they wouldn't get in less urban places - on 2007-12-20
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- There is no doubt that the general process of industrialization and growth adversely impacts the environment, at least initially, but cities shouldn’t be blamed for every smokestack. Cities are not factories. They are the concentration of people at high densities, and that concentration is pretty green. After all, we use a lot less energy when we cluster together in cities than when we spread throughout the country and drive hundreds of miles each day in commuting.
- Humans are a social species, and our greatest achievements are all collaborative. Cities are machines for making collaboration easier. Thus, I am delighted that our planet has become increasingly urban.
  - - well said. - on 2007-12-20
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- Robert Bruegmann, professor of art history, architecture, and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago:
- In the long run, however, the policies were probably less important than the eventual result — an equally massive move from the cities back into the countryside. In virtually every affluent nation on earth, the old Nineteenth-century industrial cities have exploded outward, allowing densities to plummet at the core as residents move further and further out into low-density suburbia and a very low-density exurban penumbra around that. The city of Paris today has a third fewer residents than it did a century ago, and the suburban and exurban territory around it leapfrogs more or less from the English Channel to Burgundy. In this process, the very distinction between urban and rural has all but disappeared as citizens in almost every part of affluent societies are able to participate in what is essentially an urban culture.
  - - that's a very interesting (and different) way to characterize sprawl... much more "organic," with interdependencies...
    - have to think about this one... - on 2007-12-20
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- Of course, this huge outward migration of people has caused problems, just as the migration to the cities did. And public authorities have once again tried to slow or halt the process, now pejoratively called “sprawl,” often with the explicit aim of preserving the distinction between the urban and the rural. This effort is likely to be just as futile as the effort to stop people from moving into the cities, and just as likely to be counterproductive. No one knows what the next chapter of urban history will bring, but if there is any lesson to draw from what has happened to date, it is that abstract ideas about the proper form of settlement, whether urban or rural or hybrids we can’t yet imagine, tend to lag far behind the reality on the ground.
- Dolores Hayden, professor of architecture, urbanism, and American studies at Yale and author of Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000:
- Old divisions between “city” and “countryside” have become misleading in urbanized nations like the U.S. “City” in the U.S. today really means “metropolitan region,” because we are a predominantly suburban nation. After almost two centuries of peripheral urban growth, American suburbs have overwhelmed the centers of cities, creating urban regions largely formed of suburban parts. By 2000, more Americans lived in suburbs than in central cities and rural areas combined.
- For years, when urban historians wrote about the “city,” they meant the center, the skyline, downtown. Suburbs were left out of traditional “city biographies” emphasizing economic development, population growth, and the achievements of business leaders. Everyone knew that large suburbs existed and had something to do with the process of urbanization. But most historians thought they were less significant than the city center: spatially, because they were less dense than centers; culturally, because more of their attractions involved nature than architecture; and socially, because their daytime activities involved women and children more than men.
  - - that's an excellent precis! - on 2007-12-20
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- Because of prejudices about density, high culture, and gender, suburbia resisted scrutiny for decades. It evaded both art historical analysis (based on the aesthetic assessment of outstanding buildings), and urban analysis (based on demographic and economic statistics).
- Today, Americans need to come to terms with the urbanized landscapes we have created. As Harlan Douglas, a perceptive sociologist, defined the urban region composed of suburbs in the 1920s, “It is the city trying to escape the consequences of being a city while still remaining a city. It is urban society trying to eat its cake and keep it, too.”
- Since the mid-1930s, the federal government has encouraged green field development on raw land outside of urban centers, usually through tax subsidies rather than direct spending. These incentives account for extended metropolitan expansion promoted by “growth machines” — alliances of bankers, developers, and business leaders profiting from hidden federal subsidies for suburban development.
- Excessive green field growth lies behind the national energy shortage and the mortgage crisis. Using federal incentives to constantly expand urban peripheries with commercial and residential development has had serious consequences. Reliance on imported oil, pursuit of war in the Middle East, and the credit crunch shaking Wall Street suggest that wise patterns of urban land use are more important to economic well-being than many Americans recognize.
  - - really well put; another reason to remediate brown fields and build on them; conserve greenfields. - on 2007-12-20
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- Alan Berube, research director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program:
- The way the U.N. — and most economists — look at it, a city encompasses not just the political geography that lies at the heart of an urban region, but the entire surrounding metropolitan area that functions as an economic whole. So New York isn’t just the five boroughs (population 8.2 million), but the enormous labor market that extends from Rockland County upstate, west to the Poconos, east to Suffolk County, and south to the Jersey Shore (population 18.8 million). What separates us from the world’s developing nations (and many developed ones, too) is that most Americans who live in these “cities” or “urban agglomerations” would describe themselves as living in the suburbs.
- But if you live in Westchester County, N.Y.; Cobb County, Ga.; Lake County, Ill.; or Collin County, Tex., would you really have a reason to be there if it weren’t for New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, or Dallas?
- Regardless, the same economic forces that are attracting people to large urban regions in the developing world apply here in the U.S. (and really always have). Firms and workers derive benefits from co-locating in large metro areas, in that they can each find a better “match” with one another given a greater variety of options. Big urban areas can cost-effectively support critical infrastructure like international airports, passenger and freight rail, and wireless networks. And urban proximity generates spillovers across workers, firms, and universities, embodied in the “network innovation” that powers areas like Silicon Valley (and in the venture capital that is its lifeblood). The result: big places are getting bigger. While the nation’s 100 largest metro areas (containing at least half a million people) contain 65 percent of U.S. population, they have captured 76 percent of its recent population growth. No wonder; as Ed Glaeser has argued, urbanization makes us more productive and, in the end, wealthier.
  - - the benefits of co-location - on 2007-12-20
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- My colleagues at Brookings and I have argued that in light of this reality, we ought to begin to tackle critical national challenges — on economic growth, education and skills, infrastructure, and the environment — with a keener eye toward the big, complex, messy, metropolitan way in which the majority of Americans (and now, our global counterparts) live their lives.
  - - interesting -- argues for the importance at fixing infrastructure *because* the Friedman model ("the world is flat" and it matters not where you live) isn't going to become a reality any time soon. Quite the opposite. - on 2007-12-20
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- Kunstler is a nostalgic fear-mongerer. Why are we listening to the opinions of a guy who was a theater major in college?
  - - that's what I ask myself, too... - on 2007-12-20
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