Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation

by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler Narrated by Teri Schnaubelt, Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Overview

“Expansive and entertaining. . . . [A] fast-paced and highly readable journey . . . the book serves as a useful tool in the effort to redefine the role of the city in an age of increasingly polarized politics, and reminds us that urban health is-as Fiorello La Guardia once remarked about cleaning the streets-not a Democratic or Republican issue.” -New York Times Book Review

One of our great urbanists and one of our great public health experts join forces to reckon with how cities are changing in the face of existential threats the pandemic has only accelerated

Cities can make us sick. That's always been true-diseases spread more easily when more people are close to one another. And cities 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 civilization itself.
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But cities now stand at a crossroads. During the global COVID crisis, cities grew silent; the normal forms of socializing ground to a halt. How permanent are these changes? Advances in technology mean that many people can opt out of city life as never before. Will they? Are we on the brink of a post-urban world?
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City life will survive, but individual cities face terrible risks, argue Edward Glaeser and David Cutler, and a wave of urban failure would be absolutely disastrous. In terms of intimacy and inspiration, nothing can replace what cities offer. But great cities have always demanded great management, and our current crisis has exposed fearful gaps in our capacity for good governance. In America, Glaeser and Cutler argue, deep inequities in health care and education are a particular blight on the future of our cities; solving them will be the difference between our collective good health and a downward spiral to a much darker place.

Editorial Reviews

DECEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

The authors of this quick-moving examination of the issues and problems of cities, in history and in the age of Covid, narrate its rather personal first section themselves. Both are professors of economics at Harvard. David Cutler displays some warmth, but Edward Glaeser’s professorial tone is uncongenial. Narrator Teri Schnaubelt also registers a lack of warmth. Eventually, the listener gets used to the off-putting tone, but the relentless pace of the program—perhaps due to editorial compression—defies listener adjustment. It is always comprehensible but never comfortable. The text is often interesting and informative—covering public health, education, policing, business regulation, and zoning and building—but the failure to accommodate the listener’s comfort in tone and pacing keeps this program from being fully enjoyable. W.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

Expansive and entertaining. . . . [A] fast-paced and highly readable journey . . . the book serves as a useful tool in the effort to redefine the role of the city in an age of increasingly polarized politics, and reminds us that urban health is—as Fiorello La Guardia once remarked about cleaning the streets—not a Democratic or Republican issue.” —New York Times Book Review
 
“Glaeser’s Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation, written with Harvard health economist David Cutler, shares the pleasing style of its predecessor [Triumph of the City], an engaging mixture of history and analysis . . . ‘The age of urban miracles need not be over,’ Messrs. Glaeser and Cutler write. ‘Indeed, it must not be.’” —Wall Street Journal

“Survival of the City lays out a compelling vision for reasonable, doable and affordable policy changes that would improve the quality of life in cities and benefit everyone across the nation . . . This is an important book of ideas, history and policy recommendations, a book that should be read and discussed by anyone concerned with the future of cities.” —Inside Higher Ed

“Ambitious and timely . . . a valuable resource on how to make America’s cities better.” —Publishers Weekly

“A sweeping investigation of threats to urban life. . . . A thoughtful and useful consideration of the fate of cities in the age of Covid-19.” —Kirkus

“Over the past three decades, David Cutler has done pathbreaking work on the determinants of health, while Ed Glaeser has done pathbreaking work on cities and economic growth. Now they’ve teamed up to write a book that focuses on the intersection between these two areas: how cities shape our health and livelihoods amidst a global pandemic. A fascinating read that helps us understand how we got to where we are today and design policies to build healthier, opportunity-rich cities in the future, Survival of the City will be a terrific resource for the public and policymakers for years to come.” —Raj Chetty, William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics, Harvard University

“This is a must-read for anyone interested in the health of cities and their residents. Glaeser and Cutler sift through the evidence to offer an incisive, engaging analysis of the real challenges posed by pandemics and other threats to urban life. Their clear and balanced policy prescriptions will protect cities from long COVID and help them emerge from the pandemic as resilient and vital as ever.” —Ingrid Gould Ellen, Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at NYU Wagner

“David Cutler and Ed Glaeser have written an important book on an important topic. They discuss the crucial question of how to prevent cities from becoming privileged enclaves—a development that would impoverish the world. The outline an important prescription for protecting cities around the world by addressing and learning to better address the nexus of governance, jobs, and taxes.” —Thomas R. Frieden

“In this readable yet rigorous book, two brilliant economists tackle the question of our time: How can the people and places whose energies drive our economy thrive in a post-COVID world? Their answer: put health improvement above medical care, striving outsiders before privileged insiders, and cities at the heart of a revitalized American dream.” —Jacob S. Hacker, Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science, Yale University; coauthor of Let Them Eat Tweets

“Survival of the City is a smart and surprising account of how the modern metropolis can bounce back from the current crisis, and a compelling argument for sweeping policy change. The authors—one liberal, one conservative—are not ideologically aligned, but their differences yield fresh ideas and bursts of insight. I found myself learning from, arguing with, and thoroughly enjoying every part of this totally necessary book.” —Eric Klinenberg, Helen Gould Shepard Professor in Social Science, New York University

“Survival of the City is a work of stunning brilliance. I learned something on every page, and these are topics I thought I understood. This book is a must read for anyone who hopes to talk intelligently about a post-COVID world.” —Steven Levitt, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago; coauthor of Freakonomics

“This fascinating book is about everything—the plague, COVID-19, obesity, robots, schools and more—all seen through the lens of the city, its past and future. It's a gripping read for anyone, but especially those who are wondering just what is the place of the city in their post-pandemic lives.” —Emily Oster, professor of economics, Brown University

DECEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

The authors of this quick-moving examination of the issues and problems of cities, in history and in the age of Covid, narrate its rather personal first section themselves. Both are professors of economics at Harvard. David Cutler displays some warmth, but Edward Glaeser’s professorial tone is uncongenial. Narrator Teri Schnaubelt also registers a lack of warmth. Eventually, the listener gets used to the off-putting tone, but the relentless pace of the program—perhaps due to editorial compression—defies listener adjustment. It is always comprehensible but never comfortable. The text is often interesting and informative—covering public health, education, policing, business regulation, and zoning and building—but the failure to accommodate the listener’s comfort in tone and pacing keeps this program from being fully enjoyable. W.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2021-06-22
A sweeping investigation of threats to urban life.

Harvard economists Glaeser, who specializes in urban economics, and Cutler, who focuses on health care, believe that cities offer unequaled settings for creativity, commerce, entrepreneurship, and enjoyment. “Humanity crafted itself an urban world because proximity is valuable,” they write, even though proximity also allows illnesses to spread easily. The authors examine incidences of contagion throughout history, including plague in medieval Europe; yellow fever in 18th-century Philadelphia; waves of cholera, which surged globally before reaching the New World in the spring of 1832; the influenza pandemic of 1918; and, of course, Covid-19 (some of the data on this virus is unavoidably outdated). “A central theme of this book,” write the authors, “is that the vulnerability of large, dense, interconnected cities requires an effective, proactive public sector: a shared strength that serves everyone.” They suggest ways to effectively enact quarantine, such as an international early warning system, cooperation to shut down international travel, and sequestration of impacted regions. Because the World Health Organization is hobbled by an unwieldy structure, they propose a NATO-like organization to respond to global health challenges. They critique the U.S. health care industry, which rations care through high prices. “The failure to fund public health,” they assert, “is part of the larger problem that our private and public insurance programs are set up primarily to cover acute illness costs, not to prevent disease.” Besides analyzing health issues, the authors look at other urban challenges, such as “overly expensive housing, violent conflict over gentrification, persistently low levels of upward mobility, and outrage over brutal and racially targeted policing and long prison sentences for minor drug crimes.” Among their proposals for measures that would enhance city life are extensive reforms to business and land use regulations, the strengthening of schools, and policing that would “both prevent crime and respect every citizen.”

A thoughtful and useful consideration of the fate of cities in the age of Covid-19.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173164001
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/07/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

The City Besieged

Cities can die. Earthquake and invasion doomed Knossos, the mighty Cretan city that housed the mythic minotaur. Cities often decline. Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Liverpool are all far smaller today than they were in the 1930s. Urban triumph is never guaranteed.

The decline of a city is a terrible thing to watch. It might begin with a factory closing. Some of the factory's workers then cut back on spending at local stores; other workers, those with the most education and opportunities, leave the city altogether. The tax base declines, and the city both raises its taxes and cuts its spending on police, schools, and parks. Crime increases. New businesses stay away. More people leave. Economic trouble begets social trouble, which begets more economic trouble.

For the past half century, urban decline has mostly come from deindustrialization, the exodus of factory jobs from erstwhile municipal powerhouses like Detroit and Glasgow. That crisis occurred because urban density no longer offered much of an advantage to massive, self-contained, highly automated manufacturing plants. But uncontrolled pandemic is an even more existential threat to the urban world, because the human proximity that enables contagion is the defining characteristic of the city.

If cities are the absence of physical space between people, then the social distancing that began in March 2020 is the rapid-fire deurbanization of our world. Data from cellular phones, provided by SafeGraph, shows that the number of trips Americans took for recreation and shopping dropped by 40 percent between March 14 and March 24 of 2020.

A pandemic that travels by air poses a threat not only to urban health but also to the urban service economy that provides jobs for most modern city dwellers. For workers without an advanced degree, the ability to serve coffee with a smile provided an economic safe haven after the factories mechanized and left once wealthy metropolises. Those jobs seemed safe because no matter how much we globalize, fresh lattes will never be exported from China to Soho.

When that barista's smile becomes a source of peril rather than pleasure, those jobs can vanish in a heartbeat. Before the 2020 pandemic, 32 million Americans, or twenty percent of the employed labor force, worked in retail trade, leisure, and hospitality. One fifth of America's leisure and hospitality jobs vanished between November 2019 and November 2020. Between the third quarter of 2019 and the third quarter of 2020, UK employment in accommodation and food services declined by more than 14 percent, and 22 percent of those who still have jobs in the sector are on some kind of furlough. If all of the world's face-to-face service jobs permanently disappear, the results will be catastrophic, both for cities and for the global economy.

The irony of our pre-2020 complacency toward pandemic risk is that the triumph of the city owes much to victories over prior plagues. The semi-urban inhabitants of the first human settlements were less healthy than their hunter-gatherer ancestors, partially because communicable disease deaths were more common in denser areas. Cities long depended on net migration from the countryside to replace their dead. But by 1940, vaccination, sewers, and antibiotics allowed life expectancy in urban areas to catch up to rural life expectancy. By 2020, urbanites lived longer than people in rural areas, and that mortality gap was growing-at least before the reappearance of mass contagion.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 is unlikely to be a one-time event, unless governments take pandemic preparedness far more seriously. As global mobility has grown, actual or potential pandemics have become more common. Between 1900 and 1980, only a few outbreaks threatened all of the United States: the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, the Asian flu (1957-58), and the Hong Kong flu (1968). The first of these was terrible, but our memory of it dimmed over time. Since the 1980s, the country has experienced HIV/AIDS (1980s-present), the H1N1 flu (2009), the Zika virus (2015-16), and now SARS-CoV-2 (2020), which we will hereafter refer to as COVID-19, the disease it causes. COVID-19 is itself the third in a series of coronaviruses to jump from bats to humans, following SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012. Then there are the near misses, like Ebola (2013-16, 2018-20) and the Marburg virus (1998-2000, 2004-05). If pandemic becomes permanent, then a good share of workers may decide never to go back to their downtown offices.

Contagious disease is the most obvious threat to urban life in 2020, but it is not the only one. A Pandora's box of urban woes has emerged including overly expensive housing, violent conflict over gentrification, persistently low levels of upward mobility, and outrage over brutal and racially targeted policing and long prison sentences for minor drug crimes. These seemingly disparate problems all stem from a common root: our cities protect insiders and leave outsiders to suffer.

Gentrifiers move into ethnic neighborhoods because regulations have made it too difficult to build more affordable housing in other areas. The regulations that limit new construction protect the high housing values and views enjoyed by incumbents, but exclude the young and the poor who also want an urban future. Reductions in urban crime enable the well-heeled to safely enjoy a midnight stroll, but police stop and frisk lower-income minorities who try to do the same thing. If a policeman gets too rough, then his union stands up for him, but there is no equivalent organization protecting disadvantaged youth. Suburban and private schools enable prosperous parents to ignore the enduring dysfunction of many big-city school districts.

Before 2020, our cities flourished as enclaves for the wealthy, but they were failing in their great mission of turning poor children into prosperous adults. Our cities, and our countries, must be opened again for outsiders. Business and land use regulations must be reduced and rewritten. Schools must be strengthened. Policing must both prevent crime and respect every citizen. Pandemics must cease so that urban entrepreneurs can again create opportunity, even in the poorest neighborhoods.

Remaking a system built for insiders into a machine for empowering outsiders will take years if not decades. Unfortunately, the threats to urban life capture our attention fleetingly then slip out of consciousness as our minds flit to other concerns. The Occupy movement of 2011 sought to expose the inequities of the Great Recession. The killing of George Floyd led millions to feel anger and shame over the long and sustained mistreatment of African American men and women by the police. Like contagious disease, persistent poverty and racial injustice must be addressed if cities are to thrive once more. Yet fighting any of these problems requires sustained collective effort, not a short burst of outrage. To protect our cities, we must manage not just months of protest, but years of learning, implementing, and executing.

After nearly a year of social distancing, Zooming to work, and police protests, cities look even more vulnerable than they did at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost 70 percent of American workers with advanced degrees switched to remote work in May of 2020, and 48 percent remained remote in November. Many wondered why they hadn't been dialing it in before the pandemic. In chapter 7 of this book, we will argue that even if face-to-face work returns, as we believe that it will, companies and workers have become less anchored to particular places. Better-educated Zoomers may reconsider their commitment to cities that offer expensive housing, painful commutes, and political rancor. Unfortunately, technology has not created an exit option for the less educated: only 5 percent of people who had not finished high school were working remotely during May 2020.

The Demons of Density

Physical illness plays an outsized role in this book, but this is not a book about disease. This is a book about the problems that can come with urban scale and proximity, and the fight to tame the city's downsides. Plagues spread from city to city across the lattice of global trade and travel, and then from person to person within the crowded confines of urban space. They are the most terrible demons of density. But traffic congestion, crime, and high housing costs are also common companions to city life. These ills have festered and made cities less livable.

Gulfs of inequality have been a part of urban life for thousands of years. Plato wrote in The Republic that "any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another." The fight against the downsides of density requires a truce in that war. Such a truce should be possible, because city building is not a zero-sum game. In most cities, both poor and rich would benefit from more home building, from better schools, from more humane policing, and from widely available health care that provides a stronger defense against future pandemics.

The impact of catastrophe is always mediated by preexisting social strength or weakness. The Black Death struck Constantinople in 541 CE during a period of instability. It led first to political chaos and then to centuries of rural poverty. In contrast, the plagues that slaughtered nineteenth-century urbanites, like cholera and yellow fever, did not stop the growth of New York, Paris, and London, partially because those cities came together and strong leadership made them resilient. Collectively, they invested in mighty infrastructure projects, like New York's Croton Aqueduct and the Parisian sewers, that made those cities safer. In our own time, New York shrugged off the terrible terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, because the city worked together and rebuilt itself.

But the New York of 2021 is far more fractured than the New York of 2001. The pragmatic consensus that emerged after the city's near bankruptcy in the 1970s has come undone. In 2011, demonstrators seized Zuccotti Park, practically in the shadow of the memorials to 9/11. The Occupy movement and the police response to it divided the city that had seemed so united. New York was hardly alone: the Occupy movement took over public squares from Boston to Berlin.

In the years since, divisions have widened, creating more urban vulnerability. Two months after the COVID lockdowns had begun, a policeman killed an African American man in broad daylight in Minneapolis, by pressing his knee against the man's neck for over eight minutes. Anger about the terrible racial disparities in police violence, perhaps reinforced by angst from months of lockdown, led streets to explode as they had not since the late 1960s. In some areas, city leaders, either out of fear or sympathy with the protesters, allowed whole districts to become lawless, leading to such new neighborhood names as Seattle's "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone." Urbanites across the world took stock of their cities' responses to racial disparities and found them lacking.

Any effective response to those inequities will require financial resources, and those have already been strained by the pandemic. Local finances are as precarious as they have been since the 1970s. Less employment and fewer shoppers mean lower local tax revenues. Schools face added difficulties providing classes safely. Transit systems receive far fewer fares, and little sure prospect of a quick comeback. Unlike the federal government, cities cannot print money or borrow trillions.

At the same time, people are in a progressive mood, as they were in the 1960s, and they want more for those who start with less. Those who have been left out want change. We understand and sympathize with that impulse: our urban inequities are terrible. Yet when cities try to play Robin Hood, as they did in the 1960s, businesses and the rich pick up and leave. Protesters want to defund the police, but wealthier urbanites will decamp for safer suburbs if crime rates start to rise, and the poor and vulnerable will suffer most.

If people decide that cities are too unsafe, either because of disease or crime or declining public services, we will move to a world not of cities, but of enclaves. The rich will live in their own luxurious retreats, keeping their exposure to the poor to a bare minimum. Middle-income people will form their own havens of stolid respectability, and the poor will inhabit what remains. Whatever mixing can be done remotely will. With less connection between rich and poor, economic opportunity will diminish. As the urban tax base declines, disadvantaged areas will have even fewer public services: schools will educate less well; police forces will be smaller, which may lead to more brutality and more crime. As violence increases, crime will particularly terrorize poor, minority neighborhoods as it has in the past.

A world in which enclaves replace cities is a world impoverished. Even for the rich, spatial isolation rarely provides long-term safety. The patricians who fled Rome's swelter for the comforts of Capri in the late years of the empire were still killed by plagues and doomed by the fall of the capital city. In our own time, one of the first hot spots of COVID-19 was New Rochelle, New York, a suburb half an hour outside Manhattan. In December 2020, some of the highest COVID-19 areas of the country included the wealthy enclaves of Beverly Hills, Palos Verdes Estates, and Hancock Park, all in or near Los Angeles.

There is a way to bring cities back stronger, but it is not simple. The path starts by recognizing that cities can only fund services that help the poor if they can also attract the jobs that pay taxes. Consequently, the answer is not to just tax and spend more. The spending must be smarter and strengthen the entire city. Taxpayers must believe that the government will use their money wisely and treat them with respect. This must happen at all levels-international, national, and local. We must also recognize that we do not have all the answers. We must have the humility to learn before we can transform.

Fortunately, for all the currents that buffet them, cities are stubbornly durable things. By and large, the greatest cities in the world in 1700 are still among the greatest cities in the world today: Beijing, London, Tokyo, and Istanbul. Cities have structural advantages that are nearly impossible to replicate. A fabulous panoply of people and firms creates plentiful opportunities for employment, especially in service sector jobs, that are just not present in lower-density parts of the world. Cities have museums and parks, architecture and restaurants.

The most important lesson from months of lockdown and protest is surely that human contact-real, in-person contact-is precious. Whenever the lockdowns were eased, people rushed back out to connect with other people, health consequences be damned. After watching a white policeman kill a prostrate African American man, people came together to air their anger, even at the risk of their own health. The most important gift of the city is that it enables us to be close to one another, to learn and befriend, to connect and collectively rejoice. Humanity will not walk away from that gift, especially if our cities can be better protected from the demons that haunt them.

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