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 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Is London a Luxury Resort?”
Cities concentrate luxuries and entertainments. High-end goods, engaging plays, and creative cuisines are for sale, produced by interesting people who, in turn, attract more interesting people. Companies move to large, appealing urban centers partly to draw from the pool of talented workers who flock to those places.
The sheer size of cities makes possible many of these arts. London in the late 1500s had grown large enough to support permanent theaters with their sets, actors, and directors. The many productions brought into one area a number of brilliant playwrights, including Shakespeare and Marlowe, who picked up ideas from each other’s plays and developed them into their own works. To this day, London’s West End theatrical performances are the envy of the English-speaking world.
Major entertainment tends to evolve in live venues of big cities, where, as in Renaissance London, creative artists learn from each other. In the 1970s, DJ Kool Herc used turntables like instruments at night clubs, Grandmaster Flash and MC Melle Mel added vocals, and soon Def Jam Records was recording Rap albums and changing the world of music.
Restaurants in big cities take advantage of the large pool of specialized talent available there to create exotic, innovate dishes served in beautifully designed dining rooms. The first restaurants, in 18th-century Paris, catered to more than just the nobility, spreading their costs among a much larger urban clientele and making interesting foods widely available. The resulting spread of culinary knowledge benefited other restaurants, improved home cooking, and enabled renters of small flats to meet up with other people while enjoying good food in larger spaces meant for the purpose.
Cities attract immigrants who blend cuisine from their home countries with local culinary traditions to create tasty new dishes that people likely wouldn’t create anywhere but in a metropolis. Large clienteles, both wealthy and modest, appreciate, and will pay for, experimental cooking.
City dwellers also spend more on clothing and shoes than do their rural counterparts, including more on high fashion, which thrives in cities. Unique clothing helps people stand out in a crowd and signal who they are. This is important for single people, because cities house a higher proportion of singles than elsewhere, and profusions of night spots make socializing with others easy. “Cities attract more single people than other areas, in part, because urban density increases the odds of meeting a prospective partner” (127).
In small towns, bad behavior can lead to shunning, but big cities forgive social rule-breakers by providing lots of venues where people can start over. This tends to loosen urban moral standards. For people with plenty of money and low thresholds of boredom, cities offer nearly endless new sensations in the form of art openings, new restaurants, concerts, and events.
Wages tend to reflect a city’s quality of life: Higher pay corrects for bad weather, crime problems, or other negative attributes, while lower wages imply a desirable and popular local lifestyle. In recent decades, as more cities improved their amenities, more people have chosen those places to live in.
Chapter 6 Summary: “What’s So Great About Skyscrapers?”
Between 1853 and 1870, Paris reformed under the direction of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, whose long streets lined with five-story buildings make up the Paris we think of today. To preserve that beauty, Paris restricts construction, causing housing prices to skyrocket, so that the City of Light has become “a boutique city that can today be enjoyed only by the wealthy” (136).
High-rise buildings are an attempt to make maximum use of crowded space by building upward; they’re also a way to show off. In the West, by tradition, no building would overtop the local church. Then a community erected a commercial belfry in the wool-market port city of Bruges in Belgium, whose spire for a time reached 354 feet in height. By the late 19th century, both Paris and New York had structures higher than the local church spires—the Eiffel Tower and the New York World building, respectively—and skyscrapers have grown taller ever since.
Construction methods and people’s tolerance for climbing stairs were a deterrent for building heights. Elevators and load-bearing steel skeletons, however, made increasingly tall buildings possible; in the early 20th century, American skyscrapers quickly outdid each other, growing from 300 to nearly 800 feet in height.
A. E. Lefcourt rose from obscurity to great wealth by buying and enlarging a Manhattan garment factory, then expanding into real estate, erecting many of the 20th century’s early skyscrapers and, alongside other builders, modernizing the New York skyline with efficient, tall structures that added vertical workspace to a crowded city. One of Lefcourt’s projects, the Brill Building, in the 1950s and 1960s became a center of music production, a tall city building filled with creative minds that produced a string of pop hits. “Cities are ultimately about the connections among people, but structures—like those built by A. E. Lefcourt—make those connections easier” (142).
Beginning in 1913, a movement began to save old New York architecture, especially Fifth Avenue mansions, from the wrecking ball; adherents claimed high-rise construction would harm property values, add congestion, and ruin the city. Height restrictions and zoning laws tried, and largely failed, to limit the skyscraper craze; only the Depression slowed it down for a time. After 1960, however, growth began to slow again from further restraints, so that average heights of new construction dropped below 20 stories. “The increasing wave of regulations was, until the Bloomberg administration, making New York shorter” (151).
Jane Jacobs, a self-made journalist and architecture critic, in the 1950s began to take issue with the city’s urban renewal effort, especially how it tore down diverse neighborhoods and replaced them with blocks of soaring, isolated, single-use buildings. By the 1970s, Jacobs was arguing that dense cities were environmentally greener than suburbs, but that neighborhoods with more than 200 families per acre, as with high-rise apartment buildings, overdo density and create sterility.
A simple solution is to have plenty of shopping and nightlife built into the ground floors of skyscrapers. Hong Kong, for example, which embraces change and construction, has a lively street culture beneath soaring towers.
Jacobs also believed smaller buildings would provide affordable housing for creative types; she worried that high-rise construction would increase rental costs. The opposite is true, however: Shorter buildings can’t absorb increased housing demand in a growing city. Large buildings may charge more, but they ease demand pressure on the rest of the city’s building stock.
With the razing of the iconic and beloved Penn Station railroad terminal building in 1961, a preservationist movement gathered steam to protect old buildings from modernization’s wrecking ball. The city established a Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965 with oversight of about 700 buildings. By 2010, the commission’s purview had increased to more than 25,000 buildings and 100 historical districts. Those buildings and districts have much higher rents than elsewhere. New York in the early 1960s permitted an average of 11,000 new living units per year; by 1999, that average had dropped to 3,120, and rental prices, in constant dollars, had increased nearly fourfold.
Paris has, in recent decades, faced similar issues. Largely unchanged since Baron Haussmann’s renovations of the 1850s and 1860s, the city finally got its first skyscraper in 1969, but the unpopular monolith inspired renewed height restrictions, and the city banished high-rise construction to just beyond the city limits. Lacking new construction, Paris retains its beauty and popularity but is very expensive to live in.
Mumbai tried to limit the growth of its population of 12 million by severely restricting building heights, but poor people kept pouring in, causing the city to become cramped and congested. Incompetent local governance has led to water and sewer problems, traffic snarls, and people using the streets as toilets. Meanwhile, Singapore and Hong Kong are densely populated and packed with high-rises, yet they are wealthy and pedestrian-friendly, their close-together buildings requiring many fewer cars.
Glaeser proposes three simple rules for urban planners and regulators: (1) replace arcane permitting processes with a list of fees that offset neighborhood problems caused by construction; (2) limit historic preservation to cherished buildings rather than entire districts; (3) give locals more say in the character and appearance of their neighborhoods.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Chapter 5 looks at how crowded cities act as incubators of artistic creativity; Chapter 6 explains how crowding leads to the development of vertical construction, an innovation that solves many problems but generates strong neighborhood resistance.
Triumph of The City contains many asides—they’re akin to sidebars—with background on topics related to the book’s thesis. Examples include a short history of the Boston politicos who predated the Kennedys; a brief biography of the man who spearheaded the cleanup of New York City’s streets; the urban rise of author Richard Wright; an overview of the factors that went into Boston’s decision to improve community policing; and a digression on Theodore Dreiser’s novels of city life. These mini-stories add color to what might otherwise become an overly statistical recitation of the advantages of big cities.
Glaeser builds Chapter 5 largely out of these asides: The creation of the restaurant industry; who the first great London playwrights were and how they stole plots from each other; the urban links in the creative chain that led to Rap music albums. These asides add color to the chapter’s main argument, that cities are stimulating and entertaining places in ways unavailable in the countryside. Three cities figure prominently in the chapter: London, with over nine million residents, and New York, with eight million, are major trade, financial, and entertainment centers that attract immigrants, entrepreneurs, and creative energy, while Paris’s history runs centuries deep with culinary and artistic fervent.
Much of Chapter 6 serves as an editorial against restrictions on new urban construction. The main point is that adding new housing keeps rents low. Preservationists argue against large construction projects, claiming they ruin older, historic neighborhoods. Glaeser responds that restricting development in a given area raises prices there, passes the entire problem onto nearby districts, and prevents lower-income people from moving there.
People who dislike skyscrapers often argue, with good evidence, that high-rises tend to isolate people from the street life of a city. Many skyscrapers resemble fortresses, with huge, blank walls facing the sidewalk. Glaeser suggests, instead, that the ground floors of high-rises should contain shops and entertainment. In areas where tall buildings meet the street with bistros, shops, and night clubs, a local culture quickly evolves, and the streets become vibrant. Thus, a spirited urban experience can thrive as easily in a steel canyon 400 feet tall as on a quaint street 40 feet high.
Preservationists may be trying nobly to preserve a city’s history and charm, but they may also be trying, less generously, to “keep out the riffraff” (150). In that respect, Glaeser suggests, preservation movements have the whiff of racism about them.
Glaeser loves cities, thinks they offer a better life than the countryside, and wants them affordable to more people. Skyscrapers help keep costs down by making efficient use of limited acreage, but the tug of war between builders and preservationists may always make cities somewhat more expensive than suburban and rural areas. Still, the many work opportunities available in cities will continue to attract newcomers.
