Affordable Housing Institute : US

My interest in cities was first piqued when, in 1970, I read Isaac Asimov’s two imagined-future-city novels, The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1956). 

 

Original Doubleday hardcover, 1954

 

While each is structured as a murder mystery — a wonderful armature for exploring a foreign place, as I used for that purpose in In the Cube — both are really about their imagined future cities. 

 

 

Perhaps because the Fifties were a bleak time for American cities, with the smokestack industries fleeing south and west, the cities overwhelmed by crime, dirt, and poverty, the decade produced several evocative visions, including James Blish’s Cities in Flight (begun 1953) and Clifford Simak’s City (1952). 

 

City, 1952

 

Interesting to me is that, where all of them foresaw increasing urbanization and the gradual envelopment of the city-as-arcology, as did Asimov, none of their visions was hopeful.  (Blish’s Okie cities are the most interesting economically; I’ll probably post about them sometime.)  Consider:

 

The City now!  New York City in which he lived and had his being.  Larger than any City but Los Angeles.  More populous than any but Shanghai.  It was only three centuries old.   To be sure, something had existed in the same geographic area before then that had been called New York City.  That primitive gathering of population had existed for three thousand years, not three hundred, but it hadn’t been a City.  Page 22

 

A City is an entirely enclosed space:

 

“In Medieval times, people lived in the open.  I don’t mean on the farms only, I mean in the cities, too.  Even in New York.  When it rained, they didn’t think of it as waste.  They gloried in it.  They lived close to nature.  It’s healthier, better.  The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature.  Read up on the Coal Century, sometime.”

 

Habitat 67, the culmination of the urban-brutalist vision

 

Baley had.  He had heard many people moaning about the invention of the atomic pile.  He moaned about it himself when things went wrong, or when he got tired.  Moaning like that was a built-in facet of human nature.  Back in the Coal Century, people moaned about the invention of the steam engine.  In one of Shakespeare’s plays, a character moaned about the invention of gunpowder.  A thousand years in the future, they’d be moaning about the invention of the positronic brain.  Page 12.

 

Moan about it or not, the City emerged because it was efficient:

 

There were no Cities then.  There were just huddles of dwelling places large and small, open to the air.  They were something like Spacer’s Domes, only much different, of course.  These huddles (the largest barely reached ten million in population and most never reached one million) were scattered all over Earth by the thousands.  By modern standards, they had been completely inefficient, economically.  Page 22.

 

Some months backs, I posted in three parts about cities and scale:

 

Is there a limit to the size and complexity of cities?

 

The thesis is put forward in a new PNAS paper, Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities:

 

Despite its amazing diversity and complexity, life manifests an extraordinary simplicity and universality in how key structural and dynamical processes scale across a broad spectrum of phenomena and an immense range of energy and mass scales covering >20 orders of magnitude. 

 

Highly complex, self-sustaining structures, whether cells, organisms, or cities, require close integration of enormous numbers of constituent units that need efficient servicing.  7302.

 

Cities, however, are not animate — they are comprised of animate cells (called people) and inanimate skeleton (called municipal infrastructure) and cartilage (buildings and businesses).  So they need not adhere to the laws of physics:

 

In what sense, if any, are small, medium and large cities scaled versions of one another, thereby implying that they are manifestations of the same average idealized city?  In this way, urban scaling laws, to exist, may provide fundamental quantitative insights and predictability into underlying social processes, responsible for flows of resources, information, and innovation.  7302.

 

How closely can we approximate the ideal city?

 

Enough with the overture — what did they find?

 

We find robust and commensurate scaling exponents across different nations, economic systems, levels of development, and recent time periods for a wide variety of indicators.  This finding implies that, in terms of these quantities, cities that are superficially quite different in form and location, for example, are in fact, on the average, scaled versions of one another, in a very specific but universal fashion prescribed by the scaling laws of Table 1.  7303.

 

This finding, if it stands up, would be little short of revolutionary, because it says that future characteristics of a larger city can be extrapolated precisely from its current size and characteristics.

 

Asimov anticipated these scaling functions:

 

Efficiency had been forced on Earth with increasing population.  Two billion people, three billion, even five billion could be supported by the planet by progressive lowering of the standard of living.  When the population reaches eight billion, however, semi-starvation becomes too much like the real thing.  A radical change had to take place in man’s culture, particularly when it turned out that the Outer Words (which had merely been Earth’s colonies a thousand years before) were tremendously serious in their immigration restrictions.

 

Written 1966, and the basis for the movie Soylent Green

 

Asimov thus posited the same linkage between complex city economies and immigration that we observe in modern America, as I posted at length in De Soto’s dryer.

 

I venture into this subject with great trepidation — it’s absolutely not my area and is furiously generating an enormous bonfire of punditry elsewhere — but it’s frequently on my mind, because where do enormous numbers of illegal immigrants live? 

 

Immigrant family, Chinatown, New York, 1980s

 

In slums or in affordable or public housing.

 

In Asimov’s future, scale bred overlap, which bred interdependence, which bred governmental challenges:

 

Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York had grown, in the last two centuries, to the point where all nearly touched.  The Four-City Area was almost the official name for the entire stretch of coast, and there was a considerable number of people who favored administrational consolidation and the formation of a single super-City.  Baley disagreed with that, himself.  New York City by itself was almost too large to be handled by a centralized government.  A larger City, with over fifty million population, would break down under its own weight.  Page 129.

 

Perhaps it’s not surprising that, in a novel written during the heyday of clear-cutting for urban renewal, Asimov took for granted eminent domain for economic development:

 

If the City wanted his property or even if one of the Medieval nations had wanted his property, the courts would have ordered him off, had him removed by force if necessary, and paid him whatever they considered a fair price.  Page 41.

 

Interesting echo of ‘just compensation’ — whatever they considered a fair price — for in this world, the economy, like the city, was heavily managed:

 

It was fashionable for modern political writers to look back with a smug disapproval at the ‘fiscalism’ of Medieval times, when economy was based on money.  The competitive struggle for existence, they said, was brutal.  No truly complex society could be maintained because of the strains introduced by the eternal ‘fight for the buck.’  (Scholars had varying interpretations of the world ‘buck’ but there was no dispute over the meaning as a whole.)  Page 92.

 

Whatever it was, it meant money

 

The city was also close:

 

For a moment, as the City closed in, his nose tingled to a slight and fugitive pungence.

 

He thought wonderingly: The City smells.  Page 100.

 

Indeed, cities have their own odors — Mumbai smells of goat dung, hot earth, and roast chestnuts.  So do large apartment buildings.  As I wrote a year ago:

 

Paging the aroma police!

 

Jacqueline A. Weiss, a lawyer who runs the New York real estate department of the law firm of Baker Hostetler, is also a former board president of her building who has mediated disputes over smells in her own West End Avenue building.  “Notwithstanding the fact that in New York everyone likes to complain about everything,” she said, “as New Yorkers, we’re just not accustomed to having complete privacy in our ear-space, our sightline and our nose-space.”

 

Our ‘nose-space’?  My goodness, we are touchy.  If, as Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, “the right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins,” does that reasoning likewise apply to the right to belch my fumes?

 

He had a big hooter, didn’t he?

 

Asimov himself was a city-dweller through and through. 

 

The extravagant muttonchops and string ties were signatures

 

A true claustrophile like his Caves of Steel protagonist Elijah Baley, he lived most of his life in Manhattan, and for all that he wrote of intergalactic ships, he himself was notoriously averse to flying.  He loved the urban life — yet his future New York is poor:  His detective is married and has a son, yet lives in the tiniest of spaces and uses public washrooms because his microscopic flat cannot afford it. 

 

As for the lower-income, here is what they inhabit, a futuristic bed-sitter:

 

One bath for four individuals would be considered luxury

 

Two fold-in chairs and a closet.  A built-in subetheric screen that allowed no manual adjustment, and would be working only at stated hours, but would be working then.  No washbasin, not even an unactivated one, and no facilities for cooking or even boiling water.  A small trash-disposal pipe was in one corner of the room, an ugly, unadorned, unpleasantly functional room.  Page 121.

 

In his vision of the slums inside, Asimov missed was that cities generate wealth. 

 

Public housing named for a tenement crusader

 

As I observed when commenting on the PNAS paper, Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities:

 

Because the table condenses down its data into a power-law variable beta, a bit of explanation may help.  When the authors speak of an increasing beta, they’re measuring the rate of growth in the quantity as a city gets larger (measured in number of people). 

 

 

Thus, if a Small city has a patent rate of 1x, when the city becomes Medium sized (growing to 3x its original), it will be producing 35% more patents per capita.  It’ll be 35% more competitive.  If it makes the leap to a Large city (10x the Small size), its patent rate will be 86% higher.  Bigger cities are smarter.

 

Wages too rise faster than the rate of population.  Bigger cities are richer.  Move to a city 10x your current one and your earnings will probably rise 32%.  (So too will your housing prices!)

 

Thus Asimov’s future New York City, for all that it represented the apotheosis of things he foresaw and valued, is squalid, poor, crowded, pungent — and timid:

 

“Before the Cities, human life on earth wasn’t so specialized that they couldn’t break loose and start all over on a new world.  They did it thirty times.  But now, Earthmen are all so coddled, so enwombed in their imprisoning caves of steel, that they are caught forever.  You, Mr. Baley, won’t even believe that a City dweller is capable of crossing country to get to Spacetown.  Crossing space to get to a new world must represent impossibility squared to you.  Civism is ruining Earth, sir.”  Page 97

 

If insularity was to be the death knell of humanity’s ambition — the same theme sounded in Simak’s City — what about a technologically richer world?  One with plenty of energy and plenty of wealth?

 

Two years later, Asimov wrote about such a world, in The Naked Sun.

 

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

 

 

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