“Triumph of the City” is a great book. I’ve always wanted to read something about cities, and this book was very satisfying. The author is Edward Glaeser, one of the advisors of Jheng, Shao-Yu, who is a cool scholar I’ve been following.
This is an accessible book—reading it feels like taking trips to many cities at once, as the book introduces the history and scenery of many cities. It’s also a book that builds thinking frameworks and is full of opinions.
There are no formulas or overly difficult concepts in the book; anyone who has lived in a city can relate to the text. But there are many numbers for evaluating decisions, like “one additional year of education increases salary by 8%.” The book also contains many counterintuitive insights.
My digested understanding is this: the urban issue has only one parameter—population density.
Places with high population density are called cities, low density places are suburbs.
High population density has many benefits:
- People’s talents spark off each other across short distances. Human capital has positive externalities, because working with excellent people teaches you a lot and makes you excellent too.
- In high-density places, niche or specialized industries can more easily find consumers to share expensive fixed costs. For example, theaters developed in London because there were enough people to watch.
But high population density also has downsides. These downsides are more like problems that can be solved.
First, disease and filth become serious with population concentration. So we need to find ways to bring clean water in and drain sewage out. There must be corresponding infrastructure to handle these problems.
Also, population concentration causes traffic congestion, but building more roads is useless—it just brings more cars to jam together. The author believes in congestion pricing.
The first thing people might know about Vickrey is “second-price auctions”—the principle being that winners should pay for the losses their participation causes others, namely the second-highest bidder’s willingness to pay. Vickrey once advocated congestion pricing because driving causes congestion for others, and one should pay for that burden. The second thing people might know about Vickrey is that he unfortunately died three days after winning the Nobel Prize—he had a heart attack while driving at night, slumping over the steering wheel. The author thinks he might have been driving at night to avoid traffic.
Congestion pricing is hard to implement because collecting money from voters is politically unpopular. Citizens would rather endure invisible time losses on the road.
Population density also brings crime. Theft indeed increases because big cities have more targets to “serve.” It’s mostly poor robbing poor. But crime currently doesn’t seem to have as clear an answer as congestion pricing. Much of the discussion is America-specific, so I didn’t read as carefully.
City centers also have many poor people, some areas forming slums. People see the contrast between very rich urbanites and very poor people and think cities having poor people is bad. But the author says cities don’t make people poor; cities attract poor people. And many policies aimed at reducing poverty and helping people escape poverty ultimately lead to more poor people in cities, because everyone comes here to escape poverty.
And this is good, because poor people coming to cities gives them chances to advance. In rural areas, though wealth gaps seem smaller, it’s easy to think “this is my life.” If von Neumann and Fermi had stayed in rural areas, they’d never have become excellent scientists.
So how does population density increase? How do cities form? Most cases are influenced by transportation technology and costs. Older cities might have been water transport centers.
Cities can expand vertically or horizontally.
Because of steel frame construction and elevators with safety brakes, people could build skyscrapers, letting more people live in city centers.
Because cars enable commuting, people also live in city outskirts and drive to downtown for work.
The author thinks horizontal expansion (urban sprawl) is bad—car commuting has higher carbon emissions than walking and public transport in city centers.
Living in nature-surrounded suburbs is highly polluting behavior. People wanting to protect the environment should obediently live downtown.
The author thinks people have made many bad “anti-city” policies, including limiting building heights in cities, subsidizing suburban commuting, or subsidizing home buying over renting.
People limit building heights for urban aesthetics. But if those spaces were filled with tall buildings, they could provide lots of affordable housing instead of climbing prices. The ideal example is like Shenzhen.
With this framework, I reflect on Taiwan’s news discussions.
High housing prices seem to consistently rank among top public complaints.
People complain about high prices in central Taipei. Others say those complaining about high downtown prices just want to speculate on housing. Why not buy reasonably priced houses in New Taipei or Keelung?
But according to this book, this encourages horizontal urban sprawl, which is bad.
Taipei seems to have many old four or five-story apartments, unlike Taichung with its skyscrapers to look up at.
Taiwan seems reluctant to let evil developers do urban renewal, instead trying to remedy housing supply shortages by building public housing.