The world isn't flat," writes Edward Glaeser, "it's paved." At any rate, most of the places where people prefer to dwell are paved.More than half of humanity now lives in cities,and every month 5 million peoPle move from the countryside to a city somewhere in the developing world.
For Mr Glaeser, a Harvard economist who grew up in Manhattan, this is a happy prospect.He calls cities "our species' greatest invention":proximity makes people more inventive, as bright minds feed off one another; more productive, as scale gives rise to finer degrees of speeialisation; and kinder to the planet, as city-dwellers are more likely to go by foot, bus or train than the car-slaves of suburbia and the sticks. He builds a strong case, too, for town-dwelling, drawing on his own research as well as that of other observers of urban life. And although liberally sprinkled with statistics, Triumph of the City is no dry work. Mr Glaeser writes lucidly and spares his readers the equations of his trade.
What makes some cities succeed? Successful places have in common the ability to attract people and to enable them to collaborate.Yet Mr Glaeser also says they are not like Tolstoy's happy families:those that thrive, thrive in their own ways. Thus Tokyo is a national seat of political and financial power. Singapore embodies a peculiar mix of the free market, state-led industrialisation and paternalism. The well-educated citizenfies of Boston, Milan, Minneapolis and New York have found new sources of prosperity when old ones ran out.
Mr Glaeser is likely to raise hackles in three areas. The first is urban poverty in the developing world. He can see the misery of a slum in Kolkata, Lagos or Rio de Janeiro as easily as anyone else, but believes that "there's a lot to like about urban poverty" because it beats the rural kind. Cities attract the poor with the promise of a better lot than the countryside offers.
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