Survival of the City

One of our great urbanists and one of our great public health experts join forces to reckon with how cities are evolving, and must evolve further, in the face of the existential threats the pandemic has only accelerated.

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Cities make us sick. They always have, of course — diseases spread more easily when more people are in closer contact with each other. Public health has always been central to the story of urban flourishing, from the 19th century's drives to provide clean water and sanitation to the vaccine breakthroughs of the 20th and 21st. Disease is hardly the only ill cities produce; they have been demonized as breeding grounds for vice and crime from Sodom and Gomorrah on. But cities have flourished nonetheless because they are humanity's greatest invention, indispensable engines for creativity, innovation, wealth, and connection, the loom where the fabric of civilization is woven.

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But cities now stand at a terrible crossroads. All over the world they have grown silent, as people work from home, if they can work at all, and normal forms of socializing have ground to a halt. Advances in digital technology mean people can opt out of city life as never before. Are we on the brink of a post-urban world? Almost certainly not, argue Edward Glaeser and David Cutler, but no path is inevitable. Great cities have always demanded great management, and our current crisis has exposed fearful gaps in our capacity for good governance. It is possible to drive a city into the ground, pandemic or not. Glaeser and Cutler examine the evolution that is already happening, and describe the possible futures that lie before us. Older and more settled people may increasingly opt out of city life, but that will open cities up further for the young and the aspirational. In terms of intimacy and inspiration, nothing can replace what cities can offer. But in the first place, our cities have to keep us healthy and safe; America's catastrophic health-care system is a menace to much else besides our cities, but its impact on urban life is enormous and too little understood. It is the cost behind so many other costs, including painful inequities in income and opportunity.

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Survival of the City is a profound reckoning with where cities are right now and a clear-eyed and wise prognosis and prescription for the healthy future we so keenly need for them. The fate of the city, the authors show, is the fate of us all.

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Penguin Press (September 7, 2021)

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