50 pages • 1 hour read
Edward L. GlaeserTriumph of The City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (2011)
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “What’s Good About Slums?”
Cities always contain a large portion of poor residents. This might condemn large metropolises as aggregators of squalor, but “poverty in cities from Rio to Rotterdam reflects urban strength, not weakness” (70). Thriving urban areas attract the rural poor, who tend to improve their fortunes and move up the socio-economic ladder; their good results attract yet more rural poor, who, in turn, begin their own economic climb.
A city that improves conditions for its poor tends to attract more poor people. This is a sign of success, not failure. The many businesses in a big city, with their various types of jobs, provide opportunities for poor farmers, many of whom have little talent for agriculture but discover a flare for machinery or pastry-making or sales.
An urban transit system’s stations tend to become surrounded by poor residents because the stops give them a nearby source of inexpensive transportation, especially to their places of work. If the poor flock to a particular place, it’s because that place offers them advantages and a way to move up.
The hills around Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, house shantytowns called favelas. Runaway black slaves in the 1800 established the first such settlements; in the late 1890s, unpaid soldiers set up the first of the huts and shanties seen today and lately occupied by arrivals from rural areas. Though poverty is a watchword there, the average income is higher than that of 70% of rural Brazilian workers.
Likewise, poor sectors of Lagos, Nigeria have much less extreme poverty and better access to safe drinking water than their rural counterparts. Kolkata, India similarly has lower poverty, and one-tenth the rate of food shortages, as the hinterlands. Most urban residents in poorer nations report greater happiness than nearby residents of the countryside.
Urban slums, for all their problems, offer a path to prosperity unavailable in rural agrarian regions. Already, Brazil, China, and India are becoming wealthier; this prosperity begins in their cities. Restricting a city’s growth to prevent poverty is tantamount to telling poor rural residents that they can’t ever escape their condition. Limiting cities to the well-off is not only unfair, it creates stagnation and dead-end cultures.
Government attempts to improve conditions in low-income urban areas will tend, ironically, to increase the number of poor residents. “If a government provides health care and education in the city but not in the countryside, then those services will attract more poor to urban areas” (76).
America is a land of immigrants. Today, one-third of New York City is foreign-born, and nearly half speak a language other than English at home. Newcomers to the US tend to end up in cities. Their numbers include Patrick Kennedy, who arrived penniless in Boston and whose great-grandson became a US president; Andrew Carnegie, who came from Scotland poor and grew rich building up American industry; or President Barack Obama, whose father was a Kenyan immigrant.
African Americans in the Deep South moved to northern cities for better job opportunities—some tripled their old income just by working at the Ford factory—and to escape racially restrictive Jim Crow laws. Blacks like Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington helped launch the Harlem Renaissance in jazz that spread across the country. A few, like Richard Wright, found success after working a series of jobs until they found their niche—in Wright’s case, penning short stories and books that won him prizes, a Guggenheim fellowship, and fame.
It was hard to escape racism, though, and northern blacks soon found themselves locked out of white neighborhoods, instead having to pay as much per square foot for housing as the wealthy. Decades of court fights removed most of these restrictions, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 finally outlawed housing discrimination.
Unfortunately, some of the first to leave the ghettos were the better-educated African Americans, who had “provided role models and leadership for the entire community” (84). Without them, “those communities became rudderless” (84) and worse off than before.
In some cities with limited transit options, the rich prefer to live downtown to save time commuting. Poor people tend also to live downtown in older, dilapidated buildings, and they take the bus. In New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, the center of town houses the rich, surrounded by poor residents who, in turn, have more wealthy people surrounding them. These wealthy people commute by car and, in turn, have poor residents who use public transit surrounding them. Finally, the outlying suburbs house middle-class car commuters.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development gave vouchers to get poor single mothers into low-poverty neighborhoods, with mixed results: The moms were happier but made no more money; their daughters did better in school, but their sons got into more trouble. The Harlem Children’s Zone is a private effort with a school, the Promise Academy, that admits students by lottery, demands high academic standards, has closed the math gap between black and white children, and has become a standard for other local initiatives around the nation.
Many state and federal efforts have tried to alleviate conditions in poor areas, only to encourage more poor people to move there. Attempts to integrate schools, meanwhile, result in white flight. Local school districts run as monopolies have little incentive to improve, especially in poorer areas. If inner-city schools had full funding and staff, much of the schooling problem might find alleviation—public monies spent productively on educating those who need it instead of wasted on more stadiums and fancy people movers.
Chapter 4 Summary: “How Were the Tenements Tamed?”
In one neighborhood of Mumbai, India, nearly a million people live in less than one square mile. Residents work hard at small, simple jobs, and they look after each other so that crime is low; however, pollution, sewage spills, and inadequate toilet facilities take their toll in disease. Life expectancy in Mumbai is seven years lower than in the rest of India.
Cities all over the world must deal with these types of problems. Strong leadership, unfettered by too many checks and balances, can respond quickly to problems of disease and crime that arise in downtowns everywhere. When urban public sectors become dysfunctional, crime and disease can run rampant, driving away productive workers. “This failure prevents the city from fulfilling its core purpose, lifting the country by connecting talented people” (96).
In central Africa, Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, has struggled off and on since its founding with corrupt and brutal dictators. On top of rampant corruption, crime, high infant mortality, malnutrition, lack of potable water, and periodic warfare, Kinshasa's 10 million residents suffer from malaria, typhoid fever, and AIDS. CNN considers Kinshasa to be one of the 10 most dangerous cities in the world. Its saving grace is that the country's interior is even more dangerous; its greatest hope is that other great cities, like New York and London, faced many of the same problems in the past and overcame them.
Throughout history, successful cities became crowded, which generated unwanted side effects, or externalities, including disease outbreaks. Sometimes the most effective solution involved new public services. In the late 1700s, Philadelphia and New York responded to epidemics by launching projects to replace cesspool-contaminated drinking water. New York’s private water systems failed to reduce sanitation problems until the city stepped in and built an effective public system. By the late 1800s, “municipalities were spending as much on water as the federal government spent on everything except the military and the postal service” (100).
Between 1850 and 1925, construction of clean water systems in Chicago reduced the city’s death rate by 30 to 50 percent. London in 1854 suffered a cholera epidemic; a doctor mapped the disease’s path and zeroed in on a single water pump contaminated by a nearby cesspit. When the city closed the pump, the epidemic stopped. Paris built a sewage system still in use today; Paris also introduced asphalt as a better way to pave streets and keep roads cleaner. By the 1890s, New York had similarly repaved its roads, and a street-cleaning campaign further reduced sanitation problems.
The early 20th century brought increased medical knowledge, better hospitals, and improved sanitation systems, reducing infant mortality and increasing human lifespan in New York and elsewhere. Citizens also became better educated, and the New Deal safety net of the 1930s raised living standards, all of which helped cleanse cities of corrupt political machines.
Another externality caused by civic success is traffic jams. Each additional car benefits its driver but worsens congestion, and roadway improvements invite more traffic, so the situation doesn’t get better. People pay directly for water and sewage services, but most roads are free, causing overuse. Charging tolls for road use, with higher fees during rush hours, transfers costs to the drivers and reduces congestion. London and Singapore impose central-city congestion pricing, which reduces traffic snarls. Sprawling cities in developing countries typically lack subways and sidewalks; traffic problems there are worse and harder to solve.
Fear of crime keeps people off the streets, reducing productive interactions. Crowds concentrate a large assortment of potential victims in front of criminals, and big cities suffer more crime per person than small cities. Most crime is poor-against-poor.
Crime rates vary greatly between big cities, sometimes for no obvious reason. In New York City, murder rates varied, over the centuries, between three and five murders per year, but between 1960 and 1975 the rate jumped to 22 murders per year; thereafter, it dropped back to about six per year. Rio’s favelas today have high rates, while more-crowded Mumbai has much lower rates, largely due to strong social connections and people looking out for each other.
Attempts to reduce crime by reducing poverty generally fail, while better arrest and conviction rates, along with harsher penalties, reduce crime somewhat. Low conviction rates are part of the problem in Rio and in Bogota, Colombia. In the US, between 1980 and 2000, prison populations rose from less than two million to more than six million, and crime dropped because career criminals were off the streets. Imprisonment does little to reduce recidivism rates, though, and harsher penalties can ruin the lives of people who made only one youthful mistake.
Improved use of mapping and data collection have helped police in New York and elsewhere to better allocate police resources, focusing in on areas of high crime, spotting trends, and making more timely arrests. Increased efforts at community outreach—where beat cops develop good relationships with people in the neighborhood and, in return, receive better leads on crimes and criminals—have made inroads in crime rates, especially in Boston, but overall these practices make only a modest difference.
The World Trade Center attacks increased fears that cities had become too dense and attractive a target to be safe anymore, but studies show that popular terrorist targets like London and Jerusalem still grow and thrive, and skyscraper construction continues unabated.
In America, densely populated areas tend to have lower death rates than more rural regions. Youthful accidents and suicides are higher in the countryside, where there are more cars and guns per person, but death rates among middle-aged and older people also are lower in big cities. Possible reasons also include citywide public health measures, fast information flow, lots of hospitals, and smoking restrictions.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Chapters 3 and 4 take a close look at poverty in cities, how successful urban centers attract the poor, and how attempts to reduce poverty often exacerbate it.
Telling someone in a poor urban shantytown that they should move back to their old country village is like telling someone with an old car that they should trade it in for a horse. Horses are wonderful creatures, but the least worthy automobile can do far more than its equestrian ancestor.
Glaeser points out that modern agricultural technology requires fewer farm hands. In fact, the US, which began as a nation largely of farmers, today has less than three percent of its population involved in agriculture. Much the same process of technological advance has cored out industrial work as well: In 1950, nearly 40 percent of American employees worked in mining, manufacturing, and construction, but by 2015, less than 10 percent did so. By contrast, services, which required only 30 percent of workers in 1910, now employ over 80 percent of them.
In short, Americans, and Western societies in general, have shifted in the past 100 years from farming to manufacturing to service work. Some US politicians, believing other countries have lately stolen America’s manufacturing jobs, campaign for a revival of Rust Belt factories, but it’s largely not foreigners who have taken those jobs; it’s technology.
Poverty tugs at the heart strings of the more fortunate, who try to help. Many anti-poverty programs, however, attract the homeless and others who arrive poor and then stagnate, and further attempts to alleviate their suffering often worsen the problem. It can be hard to tell the difference between the rising poor and enmeshed poverty, making the issue one of the most ticklish and controversial to resolve.
Glaeser would like to see a bit less democracy in cities, especially in India, and a bit more authority vested in urban leaders who can then respond decisively to problems of crime and disease. His argument is that, as in war, leaders sometimes need a free hand to solve difficult urban problems. The counter-argument is that such leaders can, and often do, succumb to the temptations of power and become overbearing, corrupt, and arbitrary.
A big problem with crime-reduction efforts is that each method will alienate a voting bloc. Increased policing, along with harsher penalties, fall hardest on minority neighborhoods; anti-poverty efforts, which historically have low success rates, frustrate wealthier areas that must pay for such programs.
The upshot is that thriving metropolises will attract the poor, and sometimes the best policy is to regulate the resulting problems with a light hand. Beneath all the controversies, cities quietly work their magic, transforming generations of the rural poor into working-class, and later middle-class, citizens of the urban age.
