Triumph of the City
by Edward Glaeser
16th Dec 2024:
Reading the first three chapters of “Triumph of the city: How urban spaces make us human” by Edward Glaeser.
Additional reading:
1. The Urban Transportation Problem, by John Kain, Martin Wohl and Robert Meyer.
2. The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century, by Janaki Nair
We got introduced to the idea and how this fit to set foundations of thinking about cities. A first look at the book finds that it builds a narrative on examples, based on which Glaeser starts building argument blocks about what may make a city work. There is a lot of background knowledge about the geography that the city is located within. It will be useful to have maps to see what is being described. We will try to set this up for our reading in the conference room.
6th Jan 2025:
Dear all, thank you for the discussions on Monday about what we are reading and learning from “Triumph of the city: How our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier and happier”. The first three chapters have been the focus of the readings so far.
The emergent narrative is that successful cities end up (a) growing wealth and (b) attracting diverse knowledge. Cities die when people who have wealth and/or knowledge leave. The examples offer lots of reasons, but this is the end consequence, in sequence – able** people leave, city dies. As long as this doesn’t happen, cities will survive, even thrive: “when a city attracts enough skilled people, some of them will be willing enough to work on the city’s problems and find solutions for even the most intractable ones”. An additional point to note: Cities can solve for problems of poverty; they cannot solve problems of social justice.
Thus far, the narrative. Let’s discuss if you disagree! :-)
For the next meeting, I propose that we read chapters 4,5,6.
So the next reading was on chapters that describe some of (a) the problems of negative externalities in cities (polluted water, cumulated waste, crime) and (b) benefits (entertainment and arts, variety of food and other such socio-cultural experiences, high fashion as a business, choices in marriage, high wages). Which leads into the who: building up vs. building out. and a discussion on skyscrapers and the anxieties that they bring into building cities. For all that we argued about the lack of coherence and references in this book, it does provide a useful (albeit disjointed) framework to see what makes a city work. We’re at the last chunk of the book to read and discuss for the next session.
I propose that we read Chapters 7,8,9 and the Conclusion, pages 165-271.
Date: 10 February 2025
Venue: XKDR Forum
Time: 5pm (friendly reminder that traffic jams build up from after 4:30pm when going south to north)
10th February 2025
The next reading was on chapters that describe some of (a) the problems of negative externalities in cities (polluted water, cumulated waste, crime) and (b) benefits (entertainment and arts, variety of food and other such socio-cultural experiences, high fashion as a business, choices in marriage, high wages). Which leads into the who: building up vs. building out. and a discussion on skyscrapers and the anxieties that they bring into building cities. For all that we argued about the lack of coherence and references in this book, it does provide a useful (albeit disjointed) framework to see what makes a city work. We’re at the last chunk of the book to read and discuss for the next session.
I propose that we read Chapters 7,8,9 and the Conclusion, pages 165-271.
Date: 19 March 2025
Venue: XKDR Forum
Time: 5pm (friendly reminder that traffic jams build up from after 4:30pm when going south to north)
19th March 2025:
On 19th March, we wrapped up the discussion on Glaeser’s “Triumph of the city”. The general feeling at the close of this book reading was:
1. The book was preaching to an audience that was already sold on the story of cities and growth. I thought the killer arguments in the book was (a) there is no ready formula to create a city, although diversity in wealth and income, knowledge and skills, help, (b) there is no ready formula to keep a city thriving and growing, although having universities and a diversity of industries and service providers help, (c) no matter what happens to the growth of the city, the most important aspects to retain are health, safety and enterprise – defunding the police should not be the first place to trim the budget if the city’s growth is slowing, (d) building up reduces the carbon footprint, and despite Jane Jacob’s misgivings, allows for a greater need for tolerance than building out. There are others, but these made the top of the list for me.
2. Not all books need four sessions for the reading. We should take a call on wrapping up book readings in a fewer number of meetings.
We discussed a few choices on what we should read next. One idea was EVaL because this is a slim book on pages. We should get done with reading and debating this book in one session.