CityReads | Survival of the City

Glaeser&Cutler 城读 2022-07-13

358
Survival of the City

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.

Edward Glaeser and David Cutler. 2021. Survival of the city: Living and thriving in an age of isolation, Penguin Press.

Andrea Caragliu. 2021. Book review of Survival of the city: Living and thriving in anage of isolation, 100(4), https://doi.org/10.1111/pirs.12622.

Sources:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/669805/survival-of-the-city-by-edward-glaeser-and-david-cutler/

https://rsaiconnect.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pirs.12622?af=R

Cities can make us sick. They always have—diseases spread more easily when more people are close to one another. And disease is hardly the only ill that accompanies urban density. 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 connection, the loom on which the fabric of civilization is woven.

But cities now stand at a crossroads. During the global COVID crisis, cities grew silent as people worked from home—if they could work at all. The normal forms of socializing ground to a halt. How permanent are these changes? Advances indigital 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?

In their new book, Survival of the city: Living and thriving in an age ofisolation, Edward Glaeser and David Cutler argue that city life will survive but individual cities face terrible risks, and a wave of urban failure would be absolutely disastrous. In terms of intimacy and inspiration, nothing can replace what cities offer. Great cities have always demanded great management, and our current crisis has exposed fearful gaps in our capacity for good governance. It is possible to drive a city into the ground, pandemic or not. Glaeser and Cutler examine the evolution that is already happening, and describe the possible futures that lie before us: What will distinguish the cities that will flourish from the ones that won’t? In America, they 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.

This is a book about the problems that can come with urban scale and proximity, and the fight to tame the city's downsides. Plagues spread from city to city across the lattice of global trade and travel, and then from person to person within the crowded confines of urban space. They are the most terrible demons of density. But traffic congestion, crime, and high housing costs are also common companions to city life. These ills have festered and made cities less livable.

This book touches upon many interesting questions that lie at the core of research in Regional Science, while elegantly connecting them, in fact suggesting countless possible research avenues. Just to name a few may be crucial for Regional Science: Are cities, based on the benefits due to physical and a spatial proximity, going to die? How serious is the threat posed by present and future pandemics? Will cities be able to revert to the pre-COVID lifestyle they offered? Is technological change the main responsible for the unequal developments in Western economies?

The Demons of Density

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.

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. 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.

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.

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 indenser areas. Cities long depended on net migration from the countryside to replace their dead. But by 1940, vaccination, sewers, and antibiotics allowedlife 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. As global mobility has grown, actual or potential pandemics have become more common.

The impact of catastrophe is always mediated by preexisting social strength orweakness. While Rome successfully went through several major crises, thriving for a thousand years, it did eventually feel to external threats and internal weaknesses. Its population fell from 1,000,000 people around 100 ce to 30,000,900 years later.

By the same token, while Athens acted long as a lighthouse for Western civilization, it did suffer substantially from the 430 bc epidemic of plague and after its disastrous consequences, lost the Peloponnesian war against itsarch enemy Sparta, never to fully regain its prior status again. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides (ca. 400 B.C.E./1839-1845) writes "the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law".

The Black Death struck Constantinople in 541 CE during a period of instability. It led first to political chaos and then to centuries of rural poverty. In contrast, the plagues that slaughtered nineteenth-century urbanites, like cholera and yellow fever, did not stop the growth of New York, Paris, and London, partially because those cities came together and strong leadership made them resilient. Collectively, they invested in mighty infrastructure projects, like New York's Croton Aqueduct and the Parisian sewers, that made those cities safer.

Contagious disease is the most obvious threat to urban life in 2020, but it is not the only one. A Pandora's box of urban woes has emerged including overly expensive housing, violent conflict over gentrification, persistently low levels of upward mobility, and outrage over brutal and racially targeted policing and long prison sentences for minor drug crimes.

Then, whether cities will outlive the disastrous consequences of the presently ongoing pandemic. To answer this paramount question, factors such as: fear of social interactions, businesses closing, enormous rises in public debt, and consequent reductions in funds to be invested for future generations; all lead us to perceive worsening expectations about our future chances to live in cities. While some of these factors are related to the structural nature ofcities, others are instead an economic consequence of what happened over the past year. Among the former, the decrease in confidence and trust, crucial preconditions to reap the benefits associated with the physical proximity that structurally characterizes urban living. Among the latter, shops and othereconomic activities closing, and public debt rising as a consequence of the aid measures supporting industries most exposed to the risk of closure.

Fear of social interactions

The evidence suggests that trust decreases due to local or global pandemics seem to be persistent over time. As an Italian, I would like to cite the masterpiece founding modern Italian literature, namely, Manzoni (1842). Set in Milan in 1628 under the Spanish rule, the book is also celebrated for the scorching criticism to the delusional attitude of local dwellers to one of the repeated episodes of plague.

On this front, much work is still to be done, both to reinstate prior trust levels, but also to get more prepared to possible future events that may further jeopardize our trust, and, thus, interest, in mutual interactions. In fact, cities are also a place for easier face-to-face interactions, and I dare anyone with a conscience to think of what we used to do (hanging out in pubs, attending Juventus matches or La Scala operas with thousands of fellow fans) as lightly as we used to do.

Businesses going bankrupt

This is probably the single most visible economic consequence of the lockdown measures taking place in spring 2020. Initial costs are very well documented in this book: the service economy suffers especially where low-skill jobs, focusing on social interactions, are concentrated, and that is typically an urban story. Layoffs occur almost immediately, at least in a context of high job market churning; the risk of closure is negatively associated with the expected length of the crisis; small businesses are on average financially fragile, holding few weeks of cash on hand; and in the developed world, massive use of government-sponsored relief programs.

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.

Almost 70 percent of American workers with advanced degrees switched to remote work in May of 2020, and 48 percent remained remote in November. Even if face-to-facework returns, companies and workers have become less anchored to particular places. Better-educated Zoomers may reconsider their commitment to cities that offer expensive housing, painful commutes, and political rancor. Unfortunately, technology has not created an exit option for the less educated: only 5 percent of people who had not finished high school were working remotely during May 2020.

Rises in public debt

The last few months saw enormous rises in public debt due to the activation of relief funds in most advanced countries opting for lockdown measures. This is shown in Figure 1, which, based on quarterly data for selected OECD Countries, shows the ratio of general government debt as a percentage of GDP.

FIGURE1 General government debt as a percentage of GDP, 1995–2020 (selected OECDCountries)

The future of cities

Does the future of cities look gloomy? If we look at the urban land rent markets, they certainly seem not to think so. In fact, almost in every developed economy, housing prices are constantly increasing also in real terms. Figure 2 shows quarterly growth of the FRED's Housing Price Index between January 2020 and 2021 (January 2020=100) for selected US metropolitan areas. Panel 2a shows smaller urban areas, suggesting a rise in the market's appreciation for residential housing—but if this may be due to possible relocation decisions of people previously living in larger urban areas, where they may have lost their jobs, or experienced secluded lockdown periods in small flats, the story does not change when looking at Figure 2b, which shows large US metro areas.

FIGURE2 Housing prices index for selected US cities, 2020 quarters

So: what should we expect next?

Glaeser and Cutler's book ends with an encouraging message: "A future with more hope than fear".

Fortunately, for all the currents that buffet them, cities are stubbornly durable things. By and large, the greatest cities in the world in 1700 are still among the greatest cities in the world today: Beijing, London, Tokyo, and Istanbul. Cities have structural advantages that are nearly impossible to replicate. A fabulous panoply of people and firms creates plentiful opportunities for employment, especially in service sector jobs, that are just not present in lower-density parts of the world.

The most important lesson from months of lockdown and protest is surely that human contact – real, in-person contact – is precious. Whenever the lockdowns were eased, people rushed back out to connect with other people, health consequences be damned. The most important gift of the city is that it enables us to be close to one another, to learn and be friend, to connect and collectively rejoice. Humanity will not walk away from that gift, especially if our cities can be better protected from the demons that haunt them.

Related CityReads