1. A quick thread on the new book Survival of the City by Ed Glaeser & David Cutler. Just finished it this afternoon. It's terrific. A must, must read. There is a lot to the book, so I'll focus on what it has to say for cities and urbanization.
2. First off, it's an extremely well-crafted book - a GREAT READ.
3. For me the highlight of the book are the chapters which trace the history of pandemics & plagues & their impacts on cities and urbanization. It's clear Glaeser loves this material and that he has a penchant for economic history and it shines as a high point of the book.
4. The narrative arc of the book starts off sort of gloomy. But by the end it is rather optimistic. The book is a paean to the resilience & adaptive capabilities of great cities.
5. For this pandemic & over the course of previous pandemics, it seems that plagues and infections disease may pause but cannot overwhelm the connectivity that stands the heart of cities and urbanization.
6. The book picks up on discusses so many interesting ideas. I'll mention just two ...
7. It makes an intriguing argument about the closing of the "metropolitan frontier" ...
8. And it picks up on and applies Mancur Olson's ideas about insiders, institutional sclerosis & rigidities as applying to cities today.
9. My own sense of this is that what we are seeing today in terms of relocations & migrations associated with or accelerated by COVID can be seen as activated by such Olsonian factors.
10. The book zeroes in on that fact that COVID is simply accelerating many of the key challenges to cities that were in place before it struck. Challenges like rising crime and disorder (& the perception of said) & the challenge of urban schools.
11. Those are big challenges here that were already observable back before the pandemic. I wrote about them for the NYT back in 2017. nytimes.com/2017/09/01/opi…
12. As someone who splits his time between the US & Canada (Toronto), many if not most of the big challenges they identify as facing cities - again, crime, disorder, schools - seem to be much more salient to US cities than to cities in Canada or Europe.
13. Seems to me of the advanced nations, it’s US cities that are likely to be most impacted by the pandemic, largely because of the way they entered it.
14. While the book is generally optimistic about cities, it makes the point that the pandemic is deepening not just socio-economic and racial divisions but spatial & geographic divides - both across & within cities.
15. It reinforced something @iamstevenpedigo & I have been thinking about ... the pandemic may be accelerating a trends toward not just more gated communities, gate suburbs and gated cities but to a more Gated America ...
16. Anyways, it's a great book. Do pick it up and give it a read. I learned a ton.
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