CityReads | Do Urban Empires Rule the World ?

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Do Urban Empires Rule the World ?

On the importance of urban empires.

Edward Glaeser, Karima Kourtit, Peter Nijkamp, 2020. Urban Empires: Cities as Global Rulers in the New Urban World, Routledge.

Source: 

https://www.routledge.com/Urban-Empires-Cities-as-Global-Rulers-in-the-New-Urban-World/Glaeser-Kourtit-Nijkamp/p/book/9781138601710

A new book, Urban Empires: the New City Global Rulers of the World, is coming out soon. It is edited by three scholars, Edward Glaeser, Urban Economist at Harvard University, Karima Kourtit at Open University Netherlands, and Peter Nijkamp, Emeritus Professor in regional and urban economics and in economic geography at the VU University. The 21st century is an urban century. Cities around the world display complex evolutionary patterns. This book terms the large urban agglomerations as urban empires due to the size and economic impacts and analyzes and discusses their important role in the new urban world. This book brings together a number of leading scholars in several fields of urban studies, such as urban sociologist Saskia Sassen, urban economist Richard Florida, urban geographer Peter Taylor, and geographer and spatial data scientist Michael Batey.

Here is an edited excerpt from the introduction: Do Urban Empires Rule the World?

The Rise of Urban Empires

Are large urban concentrations, including mega-cities of up to 30 million inhabitants, becoming the empires of the 21st century? In the past, polyglot populations were brought together by sometimes vast empires enabling transportation, trade and the spread of ideas. The Caesars, the Mughals, the Hapsburgs and Queen Victoria all presided over sprawling polities that defined their epochs, but the age of militarily based empires ended in the carnage of two World Wars. In the 21st century, large metropolises attract populations just as diverse as those in the old empires, and just like those empires, successful mega-cities provide mobility, spectacle and rule-of-law.

Cities have emerged as economic behemoths. London’s economy dominates the United Kingdom. When the Parisian economy shudders, all of France quails. The New York area’s Gross Domestic Product was $1.7 trillion in 2017, which would make it the tenth largest economy in the world if it were on its own. Tokyo’s economic might is comparable.

While these four cities have been economic powerhouses for generations, urban empires have been emerging on a regular basis in much of the developing world. Sao Paolo and Mexico City sprawl spectacularly, both over their regional geographies and over their region’s economies. Lagos has become the economic giant of West Africa, and India is a nation of enormous urban areas. These areas have become so large and so economically strong that it seems fair to refer to them as “urban empires”.

The rise of these urban empires reflects the combination of two related phenomena: urbanization and centralization. An urban empire cannot exist in an overwhelmingly rural nation, nor can an urban empire exist if the urbanized population is subdivided into scores of distinct, mid-sized cities. These phenomena are closely linked because both urbanization and centralization deliver proximity. Every urban area delivers more nearby neighbors than an isolated farm, but a massive urban empire provides proximity to a spectacular array of potential collaborators to solve the challenges of life.

The Rise of Urban Empires: City-Systems vs. Megalopolises

We now attempt to understand the rise of urban empires, and why these empires sometimes look like a single sprawling city, like Los Angeles or Lagos, and why these sometimes look like a network of connected smaller cities, like the Ruhr region and possibly even Northeastern America.

South America was colonized largely by Spain and Portugal, yet it is now a continent filled with cities – like Sao Paulo, Lima and Bogota – that dwarf both Madrid and Lisbon. Indeed, as the world urbanizes, Europe looks more and more unique, as it contains only a few mega-cities, at least outside Russia and Turkey. Only London and Paris could conceivably be called mega-cities.

The rest of Europe is characterized by medium-sized cities that are often surprisingly close to one another. Liverpool is only 35 miles from Manchester. Dusseldorf is 25 miles from Cologne. Antwerp is less than 30 miles from Brussels and less than 60 miles from either Rotterdam or Eindhoven. These are all modestly sized, but tightly connected by road and rail to the urban network of Northwestern Europe.

The European urban system was mature by the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Travel was determined by the foot and the mule. Farmers needed local service providers, and so there had to be many, small urban spaces spread throughout the rural hinterland. High transportation costs implied a large number of dispersed urban spaces.

When the increasing agricultural productivity reduced the need for so many people to farm, and when industrialization increased the demand for urban labor, people came to cities, and sometimes the largest cities grew disproportionately. Large German cities expanded much more quickly than small ones from 1870 to 1910, but the country never lost its basic dispersed structure. Berlin became particularly important as the capital of the empire, but the Ruhr region maintained the plethora of mid-sized places that it still has today.

As the returns to urban agglomeration have risen over the past 30 years, these once disconnected cities have come to operate more closely as an urban network. Some people will even commute between these areas, which maintain a distinct identity. The same firms can supply business services throughout the network, but their workers live in distinct, mid-sized areas with their own central business district. These systems achieve a form of scale while retaining their traditional separation, and typically maintaining some form of largely decorative agricultural space between the cities.

Latin America urbanized later than Europe. In 1920, 41% of Western Europeans lived in agglomerations of 20,000 or more. In the same year, less than 5% of the people in Latin America lived in such large agglomerations. Latin America, as well as Africa, India and most of East Asia, has urbanized during an era in which railroads and especially automobiles made transportation costs much cheaper. Consequently, when these regions and cities were growing, there was little reason to have small cities spread throughout an agricultural hinterland.

Political systems, both in the past and present, also help generate more urban concentration in much of the developing world. High mobility costs did not just generate a need for dispersed villages to service local farmers in the pre-modern age. High mobility costs also meant that monarchs could not easily enforce their will on local potentates. In Europe, the potentates developed their own urban centers, like Dijon and Dresden. The Spanish colonies were politically dominated by the Viceroys, and urban growth clustered around their power. With post-independence, these colonies were often not democracies, and urban primacy is generally higher in dictatorships, often because it is more important for dictators to placate the citizens who are near to them.

The American Northeast lies between the extremes of Europe and the developing world. The Northeast’s urban system developed around ports in the 18th century. A series of mid-sized cities developed during the late 18th century, so that in 1800, America’s ten largest cities were Salem, Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk and Charleston. Seven of these towns are in a single 325 mile band along the Northeast corridor. These cities are much further apart than the cities of the Ruhr region, but they are still reasonably near one another.

Today, the Northeast corridor contains both a true mega-city, New York, and a host of smaller, independent but linked, cities from Boston to Washington, D.C. This is a legacy of history. The distance from Boston to Washington is only slightly greater than the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Yet the California coast has no independent large-scale cities between its two mega-regions. Los Angeles and Silicon Valley just sprawl out. The eastern coast is made up of multiple cities, and must function as a city-system, while the west coast is distinguished by true car-based mega-cities, like Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay.

The Good and the Bad of the Two Models

We will divide our discussion of the two models into five areas: (1) the public costs of the two systems (which generally favor the mega-city); (2) the quality of life differences (which generally favor city-systems); (3) the differences in the nature of agglomeration; (4) the social consequences of the two systems, like segregation; and (5) the environmental concerns. In many cases, our discussion is more theoretical and speculative because of the limited availability of hard data to enable the comparison of mega-cities with city-systems of similar income levels.

The first is that mega-cities are much cheaper to create than clearly articulated city-systems. Indeed, many mega-cities have emerged precisely because the government is so absent, and unable to regulate and shape urban growth. The public sector pays the costs of a single urban center, typically with some form of limited local infrastructure.

City-systems typically require duplication of city centers, which are usually paid for by the public sector. These city centers often have public spaces, monuments, museums and other costly amenities. The city-systems also typically have land-use controls that leave empty space between the cities, and these require an efficient public administration that is missing in much of the world’s poorest countries.

Second, the public costs of city-systems are offset by the quality of life benefits. If a city-system has five central business districts, then it enables five times as many people to live within five miles of a city center. Consequently, city-systems are far more compatible with shorter commutes and there is less pressure to crowd in areas close to the city center. At its most extreme, a city-system provides a series of very livable, human-scaled spaces, while a mega-city is a daunting morass of humanity that moves painfully slowly because of crowding.

Third, mega-cities are in almost any real sense much larger agglomerations than equivalently sized city-systems. Mega-cities are also more flexible spatially, which enables them to accommodate changes in production technology more readily. For example, it is easier to relocate factories to ex-urban space on the edge of a mega-city, than it is within an urban system. Mega-cities can also enable a variety of spatial connections between different industries, as long as their roads are not completely blocked by congestion. Typically supply chains can work along flexible non-radial connections in mega-cities. Since mega-cities are often designed along highways, goods manufacturers can find it easy to export goods from the region. This is not to claim that city-systems cannot also be quite productive, but mega-cities’ flexibility and scale offer certain basic advantages that are hard to duplicate precisely with a linked system of smaller cities.

Fourth, the social outcomes. Some mega-cities, like Mumbai, Nairobi and Mexico City, are also known for having particularly large concentrations of poorer citizens. In consequence, the smaller scale of urban areas in city-systems leads to less massive agglomerations of the poor. Consequently, the mega-city is far more likely to produce a vast area inhabited only by the urban poor than a city-system.

The final key difference between the two systems is environmental. Mega-cities almost invariably involve longer commutes, and this means higher levels of carbon emissions. In some mega-cities, like New York and London, the commuters use public transportation and this means a somewhat greener city. In car-based mega-cities, the carbon emissions are likely to be especially high. Moreover, since mega-cities involve so many cars sharing common roads, the resulting traffic delays can lead to more extreme energy use and air quality deterioration. Mega-cities generate more environmental stress in other ways as well. The green spaces inside city-systems can improve air quality. Since fewer people are crowding into a single urban center, the challenges of waste become less severe. These differences are exacerbated when mega-cities have weak governments that have trouble addressing the downsides of density.

In practice, it is rare that a country has a viable choice between the two models. Most of the developing world does not have the capacity to reproduce a European city-system. European political factors strongly limit the ability of distinct cities to agglomerate into a mega-city.

Who Does the Urban Empire Benefit?

The rise of urban empires has often been associated with enormous disparities of wealth. The most successful urbanites, whose luck and ability enables them to take full advantage of urban scale and global connectivity, command vast fortunes and are largely insulated from the down- sides of density. The least successful suffer from many urban dysfunctions.

Yet, it is mistake to see urban inequality only as a negative. When they work well, cities are able to attract poor people and turn them into middle-income people. But, there is some troubling evidence that suggests that this urban escalator is stalling too often, and may need a bit more policy support.

While urban empires often contain vast numbers of poorer residents, they often have limited powers to address the problems of poverty. Cities are less likely to work as upward escalators for their poor if they do not allow those poor to start their own businesses. Cities are also less likely to empower upward mobility if their schools are weak.

The age of urban empires

Urban empires are indeed evolving in the complex urban world, but not in a traditional sense. Such empires – both physically and virtually – suggest a new and prominent role for urban systems in our world.

This volume on the intriguing theme of ‘urban empires’ aspires to map out the backgrounds, mechanisms, drivers and consequences of the radical changes in modern urban systems from a multifaceted perspective incorporating multiple disciplinary approaches.

The present volume on urban empires is based on three cornerstones: (i) a positioning of recent developments and stock-taking of modern cities; (ii) a scientific assessment of current urban developments; and (iii) a collection of lessons from current urban case studies and experiences.

This book is organized in three parts. Each of these parts contains a set of well-thought scientific analyses on urban phenomena written by well-known experts or scholars in the field. Part A of this volume whose theme is dedicated to ‘Urban Empires’ provides a collection of original and sometimes daring contributions on the dynamic role of cities and metropolitan areas in the urban age. Part A of this book demonstrates clearly that the ‘New Urban World’ is a process; it is work in progress. The megatrend of ongoing urbanization on our planet does not lead to a uniform pattern. The ‘urban century’ is an age of urban diversity. The next part of this volume, Part B, contains a collection of scientific contributions that zoom in on the assessment of preconditions or of the expected consequences of large-scale urbanization in our modern urban world.  The final part of the present opus, Part C, is concerned with the formulation and presentation of lessons and general findings from various case studies on urban affairs and spatial patterns all over the world. The pluriform appearances of modern city-systems and their relationships to emergent urban empires prompt the need for a new research framing in which the conceptualization of complex urban systems has to be oriented towards the massive heterogeneous data flows that characterize the functioning of urban empires worldwide.

Urban Panorama

The economic geography of our world will in the near future show a dramatic transformation from a rural economy to an urban landscape. Cities – and in general, urban agglomerations – will tend to become bigger and bigger, leading to rapid rise in mega-cities with more than 10 million inhabitants. In addition, there is a double urbanization phenomenon, as the number of large cities above 1 million people is also rapidly increasing. It is therefore, inevitable that the future world will become an urban world, often called the ‘New Urban World’, with the rising importance of big metropolitan areas.

This mega-trend towards the ‘New Urban World’ will be characterized not only by socio- demographic features leading to a rapid rise in global, national and regional urbanization rates, but also by a change in the economic and political power position of large cities. Mod- ern urban agglomerations – with a dominance of mega-cities of over 10 million people – are evolving into economic, cognitive and technological powerhouses which far transcend the traditional borders of cities, regions or sometimes even nations. Indeed, large cities matter! They may become new institutional agents with an economic power impact of an unprecedented degree.

New knowledge on global urbanization trends – and of global city networks – is a sine qua non for managing the complex evolution of our ‘New Urban World’. Smart or intelligent cities are not a luxury, but a necessity for realizing the UN SDGs. This calls for a novel conceptual framing, a creative methodological ramification, an up-to-date information collection and data architecture, a sophisticated evidence-based research approach (including ‘big data’), and a fit-for-purpose policy analysis serving the needs of the citizens in the ‘urban century’.

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