Each year since 2011, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where my daughter is a professor in the business school, designates one book as the Go Big Read book of the year which all faculty, staff, and students are encouraged to read. The selection process is a mystery to me, but the last two, Evicted, (about life in the slums of Milwaukee) and The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (about the St. Lawrence Seaway project) were certainly interesting and educational documentaries. It seems I am now included in the group expected to read them as I usually get a book from my daughter for Christmas. But what I got from Wisconsin this Christmas and mistook for this year’s pick, Triumph of the City is thankfully not the pick for the university-it would put the whole campus to sleep. It is written by a Harvard economist, which does not entirely explain why it is arid, humourless, and disorganized. There are a host of interesting historical facts, tons of data and keen observations, but no assessment of what the statistical significance of the data is and correlation seems to be equated with causation. Nevertheless, I am sure my daughter finds a lot of the data very useful in her teaching and research in real estate economics.
The stark and arbitrary contrasts of cities with rural areas seem to me to be only partially justified and some are inconsistent with my experience. I spent the first 18 years of my life on a hardscrabble mixed farm, then the rest (so far) in three very different cities, in student residences, a mental hospital and a nursing home (free room and board as a debt-ridden budding doc in exchange for some menial services), rental housing, four apartments and five single family homes. I now live in a large high-rise apartment complex in Canada’s largest city geographically- larger than Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver combined, not including the adjacent city of Gatineau across the Ottawa River. But fully ninety percent of the land area within the boundaries of the city of Ottawa is rated as rural. If I lived on a 100 acre farm within the city limits, growing cash crops or livestock, would I be considered a country bumpkin or a city slicker for the purpose of comparing urban and rural societies? Any data about Toronto as a city will fail to take into account the contiguous urban areas stretching from Oshawa to Hamilton that remain separate entities only because of arbitrary boundaries. City boundaries are, by political necessity, arbitrary, but the demographic borders of cities, unlike the legal ones, are often are very fuzzy.
Glaeser makes a strong argument that urban slum dwellers worldwide still have much better prospects than their rural counterparts, that it is better for them to migrate from poor farms to urban slums than to stay in the countryside, and that building dense cities with more skyscrapers rather than sprawling suburbs is better for all societies. In this latter assertion, he seems to contradict the early arguments of Jane Jacob’s in The Death and Life of Great American Cities” while praising her “remarkable intellect” and describing her book as a “great masterpiece”, even as he refutes every argument she made about city planning. And he makes a very convincing case for more dense vertical urban housing as an eco-friendly way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with the resulting reduced car travel and less need for energy for heating and cooling, especially in temperate California. But California does more than most states to promote sprawl and restrict density. And he adequately documents the adverse unintended consequences of NIMBYism and enthusiastic preservationists. This is highly relevant nearby as the city of Ottawa, Clublink, and locals debate the plans for the future of the failing Kanata Lakes Golf Course about one km away from us.
There are some very jarring lapses of copy-editing and proof-reading. What is conveyed by “Frank Sprague was, like Henry Ford, a brilliant mind, collected by Thomas Edison.”?
Economists and urban planners no doubt are keen on this book, but parts of it are so dry I am keeping it away from anything flammable, lest it undergoes spontaneous combustion.
The Passionate Reader 