The century of cities
Making cities work will be the greatest demographic challenge of the twenty-first century.
It’s taken me about four months — since Rockefeller’s urban symposium — to figure this out, and get a glimmer of what it means for all of us.
Last July, I had the privilege and unbelievable intellectual pleasure of participating in Week 1 of the month-long Rockefeller Foundation symposium on urbanization at their study center in
Between the Bellagio conference and my work with SDI, I’ve been thinking — one might even say obsessing — over what this unprecedented urbanization means. It’s more people than ever, moving to cities faster than ever. The numbers are jaw-dropping.
Already more than half the world’s population lives in cities (urban areas), and the percentage will only rise. Over the next 25 years, at least 2,000 cities will exceed one million people apiece.
Let’s make that visual.
The largest football stadium in
Now, imagine ten Big Houses filling every four days, and you have a sense of the rate of urbanization.
By 2030, two billion more people than today will live into cities.
Why are they coming? For a better life, for the money economy:
As Rakesh Mohan put it when I was at Bellagio:
If the world is urbanizing, it’s because people think it’s a good idea.
Despite the problems of urban environments, overall welfare has increased in cities in every dimension we can think of. Despite massive inequality, even Mumbai pavement dwellers have access to municipal schools. They still have a benefit compared to where they came from; they all say, “We are much better off than our relatives back home.”
Reversing my frequent quote from Fields of Dreams, if they come, you must build it.
We’re here for the jobs
The urban revolution of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is reshaping the world: demographically, physically, and economically.
For nations, comparative advantage will increasingly lie in the relative efficiency of their cities.
As Adam Smith knew,
the wealth of nations comes from cities
Throughout history, cities have been the engine of change.
In the 19th century, cities meant dark satanic mills
Now they mean office workers
As I wrote a while back:
[The authors of] a fascinating new PNAS paper, Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities, by a quintet of authors bookended by Luis M. A. Bettencourt and Geoffrey B. West … make no bones about their interest in cities and their reasons for tackling the problem now:
Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. Cities have long been known to be society’s predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also its main source of crime, pollution, and disease.
I really like a crisp, clear expression of the challenge: cities have always been where wealth was born, yet bringing so many people together in proximity has all those negative externalities. When one vector (wealth) goes one way, and another (disease) goes the other, we want to know which (if either) will prevail, or whether they can reach a happy medium. Moreover, the problem is urgent:
The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development.
We may pine for the country villa, but we create the means of building it in cities.
Musket, silk clothing, wrought-iron bench — all from cities
We didn’t get out of the Stone Age until we settled down in cities, and if we stop making cities better, we’ll head back that way.
For cities to work, their housing must work, because housing is the linchpin of cities.
Cities are homes plus jobs plus density (which means verticality).
Without housing, there would be no cities – for what is a city without housing?
All of these are parts of a city, but without housing, at night they are just so many dark shells.
Housing is what makes cities bright at night.
It’s not their jobs that keep those lights on at night
The nineteenth was the century of empires; the twentieth the century of democratic nations.
The sun never set on the map’s pink areas
I think the twenty-first will be the century of cities.
Not that nations are or will become obsolete; they’re the largest-scale (and therefore most important) element of the three levels of government. Cities exist within national borders and depend on national assets and attributes. National governments are critical to global defense and global security, and to domestic macro-economic policy: taxation, interest rates and currency values, and the broader economic and job environment. Still, urban policy is metropolitan, not national. Successful nations can have very unsuccessful cities, and successful cities can arise even in unsuccessful nations.
Even when both the nation and the city are functional, many of the policy choices to be made in making the city work arise at the metropolitan level. We’re seeing this here in the US housing policy innovation inversion, about which I’ve written before:
The bottom-up inversion hasn’t stopped at the state level. As we’ve seen with my posts on zoning as destiny, workforce housing *is* affordable housing, inclusionary zoning, today’s affordability gap, there’s continuing pressure and innovation at the local level, even as this brings localities into conflict with their higher unit of government — the state. Localities, not states, are seeking to stipulate how rich is poor?, what kind of workforce housing to create, and for whom.
I think this inversion is the reason that affordable housing is only now emerging as a policy issue; it’s taken nearly twenty years for the diversity of grass-roots stories to penetrate the policy fog that has been blanketing the decision-makers high on Mount Olympus Capitol Hill.
Okay, all lobbyists out! We have housing policy to make.
Even the very little work I’ve done with SDI so far has shown that their most effective counterparties are neither global entities nor national governments, but municipal governments.
Cities have their own box of policy economic tools. Municipal finance, housing strategy, zoning and local taxation — all are usually within the locality’s control. Cities have to learn their own expertise. They have to become financially and politically autonomous with respect to internal urban policy.
Those of us who work in housing, or urban development, have to help cities succeed even if their larger units of government do not. We may be unable to do anything with the nation of Zimbabwe, but maybe we can do something in Bulawayo.
At least it’s the right place to try.
House in
Making cities work will be the greatest demographic challenge of the twenty-first century.
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