Initially, geographic advantage (such as being near harbour, river, or some other geographic feature) gives a settlement that's not yet a city a big advantage in attracting more people there. This in turn, forces the city to grow as more people cram in.
To artificially build denser by policy doesn't produce opportunities - those opportunities would have to be there first! And it's this "expensiveness" of creating more accomodation in the city that causes the city to expand.
Most cities around the world (except some cities in the US) are "strategically" located near a river or on shore. Because of that, pretty much the whole world live near a river or sea. The most strategically located cities "become" a trading hub and these days have become large cities.
It's well worth mentioning, however, that if the people in the city (who where strategically located for trading) didn't adapt to the changes in the world conditions, then these cities simply disappear or become much less relevant. Many cities of the world would have lost this privilege due to digitalization and the sea becoming safer.
It's impossible to separate the people from the social institutions which do create the opportunity in the services sector which dominates modern advanced economies.
In the Bay Area/SF the digital economy is defined by the ecosystem of big tech, VCs, thousands of software engineers and maybe tens of thousands of support services like accountants.
not sure this is a good example - while it's true for actual gold mining, in the case of software developers, having other software devs around (plus also good computers, which you could argue is like gold) can be an opportunity in itself - look at all the devtools startups that happen in the Bay Area.
A large group of people is an opportunity in itself.
I'm not sure if there's been some slight shift of topic here. By "planned", I think we originally meant "deliberately built in relatively undeveloped land". But then you mention as an example of a failure of deliberately building a city in relatively undeveloped land, an example of a failure of micromanagement (also a kind of planning, but one that is completely orthogonal to the circumstances of the city's founding).
So does Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning show the problems of strictly separated zoning, or does it show the problems of deliberately building a city where none was before? It's possible we just had the wrong idea of what you need to have a great city during the 20th century isn't it? Washington DC, for instance, is an artificial city with top-down planning, but it was built at a time when people had different ideas about what made a great city, and it doesn't really seem to be a failure. It doesn't even appear on your list, despite being the case that served as a template for your other examples.
(I don't know. I don't know anything about Brasilia other than that it is the capital of Brazil.)
As I recall, DC was designed by George Washington himself (probably with help from his friends), back in the late 1700s, but the city as a whole was not: what they designed was the Federal district only. The Capitol, the White House, the National Mall between them, etc. Over time, this grew with the additions of the Smithsonian buildings and many other things.
The thing is, no one lives there. That district is entirely devoid of residential areas in fact, and with very little commercial stuff if any. All that stuff is mostly to the north, and I don't see any evidence of it being planned top-down at all, except maybe the original street layout which is largely a simple grid, with lettered streets running east-west, and a few interesting things like Dupont Circle (which probably came later).
DC is definitely not a place I'd call a "master planned city" or "artificial city"; it's evolved far too much in the last 300+ years.
I am from DC and it's pretty well known that it is a planned city. Look up the L'Enfant Plan.
I'm not really sure what you are talking about.
The military dictatorship decide to introduce strict zoning (probably lifting ideas that were happening in the USA during the 60s), completely destroying the urbanistic approach of the original design.
It's a failure of micromanagement from authoritarianism, inspired by the misguided (and nowadays considered idiotic) approach to urban design of the USA in the 50s onward.
Brasilia is also what I would call "not a city", it has a pretty large population which doesn't live in it like in a city. There's very few vibrant public places there, from an urbanist perspective it's a complete disaster.
I initially read this as meaning "if the money was ever moved out", and then laughed ... yes, if they ever stopped being the capital ...
Don't languages in general have single words with multiple meanings? Is this a special feature of English?
That's not what I'm referring to; it's the confusion over "capital" vs "capitol" (in addition to the double meaning of capital city vs capital-money).
Density is an effective way of substituting for transport speed, which is the binding constraint on many opportunities.
The number of coffee shops I can choose to visit on my 15 minute break after stand up is limited by the density of the urban environment, for a given mode of transport.
Many public, private and social enterprises have this dynamic. A police station needs to be within a certain travel distance of the outskirts of their community to be useful, likewise a supermarket or nightclub.
There is an argument that, at a certain extreme point, density might have such a negative impact on transport speed that it might increase transit time. I'm personally split on this issue. Density definitely hurts motor vehicle speed but has little effect on walking speed and might even improve rail speed.
What is the dynamic in "this dynamic" ? Do you have an examples with social enterprises?
I intended the phrase "this dynamic" to capture the relationship between transport time and viability of the enterprise.
> Do you have an examples with social enterprises?
Sure thing. Food banks, soup kitchens and homeless shelters all need to be within a viable transport time of the people they intend to help.
Is the existing population of the city better or worse off? That's the question that matters politically, since only the existing population gets to vote in city elections.
Imagine you build housing such that 5 Million more people can move to Boston. Imagine that housing prices do not go down, and do not go down in other cities either.
That implies that that 5 million more people are now earning Boston-level salaries and 5 million more people were able to make the personal choice to move to Boston.
These 5 million people are on average doing higher-productivity jobs than before, which means economic growth.
Yet at the same time, these 5 million people now have a lower ecological footprint than they would have had if they stayed where they lived before.
These 5 million people are arguably better off, and the rest of society is also better off.
> That implies that that 5 million more people are now earning Boston-level salaries and 5 million more people were able to make the personal choice to move to Boston.
...How did those 5 million better-paid jobs got created? How did the 5 million people connect with them? Not everyone is 18-25 y/o you know, a lot of people know one profession and don't want to ever learn another (assuming the jobs pertain to a different profession, but I'd say that's a safe bet that not all of them will cover the professions of these 5 million people).
> These 5 million people are on average doing higher-productivity jobs than before, which means economic growth.
Better salary rarely correlates with better productivity in my experience and observations. People love their titles and prestige and are chasing after them just for the extra salaries they bring. And even if we ignore that, a lot of companies pad budgets for well-known reasons: if you don't spend your entire department's budget then it will be reduced in the next quarter or fiscal year, and you as a manager are very likely to get skipped when handing out bonuses. This has often led to managers hiring expensive consultants that barely do anything. These people are laughing their way to the bank and the economy gains nothing from it (those consultants will not reinvest 100% of the money in the local economy; I'd count it as a huge win if they reinvest even 20% but I have no data proving that they do or that they don't).
So yes, while the new 5 million people could have better salaries, that says almost nothing about productivity or helping the economy at large with this theorized increased productivity.
> Yet at the same time, these 5 million people now have a lower ecological footprint than they would have had if they stayed where they lived before.
I am most of all challenging this one. I've known a lot of people in rural areas years ago, some of them pile wood and small amounts of coal for 3-5 years ahead for prices I'd find laughable and a rounding error in my 3-month expense budget -- and before we talk about ecological impact or CO2 footprint, most of this wood was cut 5 years ago, it's not removing new forests. They manage their heating extremely efficiently. It really opened my eyes how much us the city people look down on others in terms of ecology when in fact we know next to nothing about how is our local electricity procured, how much CO2 it releases in the atmosphere, and how is it even subsidized (a huge topic for another thread / time).
So obviously this is down to context (and I have no idea where does Boston get its electricity, or any such city that your idea might pertain to) but to me this is not as clear and cut as you make it sound.
...And that's not even mentioning rural people getting solar panels and literally having 5-10% of their winter power bill during the summer.
......And it's also not mentioning that some of them did a combination of a family picnic + were gathering dead wood / twigs / dry leaves sometimes and these easily accounted for no less than 5% of all their heating in the cold months. This is not destroying the ecological system, it's merely being super efficient by removing mostly useless bio matter (and very far from such a huge scale that it will hamper enriching the soil, before you say it!).
> These 5 million people are arguably better off, and the rest of society is also better off.
As you yourself alluded to, that's not a given, like at all. 5 million people moving away from rural areas could arguably leave 10+ million elderly people without care or even ability to have their kids arrive to their location quickly if they have a medical emergency.
Which part of "society" is better off? City real estate renters for sure. Who else?
Local sandwich shops, laundromats, coffee joints, ice-cream truck? I'll give you all of those and I like how city people inter-mingle both in terms of physical presence and capital. But I remain skeptical that society as a huge entity is actually better off.
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IMO your take is a very idealistic one. Still, I do my best not to sound like I am attacking you, I am kind of confused that I can't see a single correlation in your string of assertions and I am curious if you can back them up with something more than aggregated (and very diluted) historical statistics.
So I will just pick your first question as an example:
> How did those 5 million better-paid jobs got created? How did the 5 million people connect with them? Not everyone is 18-25 y/o you know,
These jobs got created because companies were able to hire employees into roles that they would otherwise not have been able to fill. and yes, not everybody is 25, but a whole lot of people are…
I don't think that matters in this argument because the author assumes that housing prices will rise, which would only be possible if there is growth in desirable jobs. If 5 million high paying jobs don't get created, you don't have to worry about rising home prices because very few people would want to live in a place more expensive place on the same income. Instead you'd have a situation like Tokyo where housing prices don't rise.
>I've known a lot of people in rural areas years ago
They are alluding to suburban rather than rural migration. Your average country folk isn't going to suddenly decide to move to NYC. You need about 30 acres for an indefinite supply of firewood. You're probably not going to able to aquire that much land within a reasonable distance of an office, and if you can, you'd be wasting a lot of energy with commuting.
Agreed, that's what I am arguing for in fact. Prices either rise or stagnate, but for them to actually drop... it takes a while until the people who are very invested in the constant growth of the market to realize things don't always work that way, and correct their prices more in tune with reality.
Again though, it takes a long time.
> They are alluding to suburban rather than rural migration.
Ah, fair. Suburban living was economically viable for one brief dreamy moment in time but I am afraid it has not been that for a few decades now.
There's no way that urban living isn't far more climate friendly than rural, even if the rural housing is getting some energy from solar or burning wood.
Honestly, I even think detached houses beat most apartments. Apartments often depend on electric baseboard radiators and window AC units for heating and cooling. They often have multiple massive hot water heaters where the people on higher floors must leave their water running for 10-15 minutes before they start getting hot water. They also tend to have outdated appliances that are less energy efficient like electric ranges, and old refrigerators and ancient clothes washers/dryers. In most of the apartments I've lived in, it was firmly against the rules to hang your clothes on a line to be dried by wind and sun.
These appliances are often not as well maintained either. Tenants aren't pulling out the fridge to clean the coils and landlords rarely do either. Renters don't have the ability to make the kinds of improvements that would reduce their energy bills and landlords are incentivized to cut corners since it makes building much cheaper and the expensive utility payments are the renter's problem.
Public transportation is better than driving cars, but most people don't use public transpiration anyway and the number of cars on the road in dense urban settings is much higher than on rural streets. We can see that reflected in the air quality, which is abysmal in highly populated urban centers compared to rural areas.
Urban environments have fewer trees, fewer unpaved expanses of land, more pollution (air, water, light, noise), less wildlife (greater habitat destruction, more poisons and other dangers to animals) and more trash/litter.
Urban settings are by far less climate friendly than rural settings, but certainly we'd have new problems if everyone lived 2 miles from their nearest neighbor.
There's a middle ground that I don't think we've really reached yet but for now it's probably a good thing that we have masses of people concentrated into small tightly packed highly polluted pockets of filth and disease and also wide open spaces where it's clean and quiet, where animals can live, and the air is cleaner. We'd be smart to try to increase the efficiency of the spaces we move into while still avoiding going over the number of humans a given area can sustainably support, but I have a feeling that there will always be people who want to live farther way from anything else than is practical and people who want to live in areas that are too densely populated to be good for the environment.
The incentive to make improvements comes from ownership model, not form factor. Apartments can be owned and houses can be rented.
It's not about how much land a person uses, it's how that land is being used. Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt. Urban living is "paving over more the environment" and you can see that with just minutes spent with Google maps looking at satellite views of urban vs rural areas. Rural areas are filled with grasslands and trees (and farms) while urban areas are vast expanses of concrete and asphalt with tiny islands of grass and trees.
People in rural areas take up more land while at the same time using (and abusing) far less of it. Having largely unspoiled nature around you is a large part of the appeal to rural living, or so I'm told, I actually prefer living in cities.
Rural people don't pave over all of the land that they have, but they certainly pave over more of it than each person's share of paved over land in an urban setting.
If all the people in the entirety of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota lived at the density of NYC, more than half a million square miles or more than 99.9% of the entire land area in those states would be completely untouched wilderness[1]. If you think that all human habitation in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota combined has a smaller impact on the environment than 469 square miles of NYC, then you are clearly delusional.
[1] https://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/10/popul...
Like I said: the greater the number of people in a given area the worse it will be for that environment.
We need to find a better balance between stacking people on top of each other and destroying the ecosystem in the places where we live without any thought to biocapacity or local wildlife, and spreading out so far that it's impractical and inefficient to deliver or provide the goods and services humans want.
Since every human takes a massive toll on the local ecosystem, spreading that impact out more than we do in highly packed cities would be better for the environment and also better for humans who also suffer under those types of conditions. As I said, I don't think I've seen that balance hit quite right just yet, but it's something we're going to have to start thinking about more carefully as resources like drinkable water grow scarce, climate refugees from around the world are taken in, people along the costs are forced inland or to higher ground, and much of the western US succumbs to desertification and high temperatures that threaten to make large population centers unsustainable.
The US is likely going to get a lot more crowed in the future. We'll need to find a better way than absolutely trashing the land we settle on and suffering all the effects that go with that.
It is absolutely ludicrous to suggest that it's better for the environment to take up 1000 times as much of it.
And the parent commenter does not consider a garden "environment/nature".
Nature in general is important because it creates biodiversity and space to roam. Forests in particular are sequestering CO2 and are producing oxygen.
The average garden behind a detached house does approximately none of that.
It's cities that depend on gardens and parks to serve as the only available "nature". Rural areas are filled with forests and woods and grasslands and support far greater numbers and varieties of wildlife than cities do.
We could decide to pack people like sardines into the smallest possible space, completely destroy the local ecosystem in the areas where we live (allowing the pollution to spread outside of our overcrowded cities the same way China's pollution currently crosses the ocean to fill the skies in California), while also suffering the countless costs to our own health and safety those conditions cause in the process just so that we can have vast expanses of polluted but undeveloped land that no human can use for anything, but I propose something a bit more balanced, where we spread out enough so that the biocapacity of the land we settle on isn't exceeded, but still near enough to each other that we can still efficiently sustain a civilization. That means a population density that isn't overcrowded, but not so far apart that we lose all of the efficiencies we gain by living near each other. I'd much prefer to have biodiversity within the places we inhabit and keep space to roam for humans as well as the other animals.
[0]:https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/about/press/pr2023/2020-vital-s... [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/life_expectancy/li...
You are saying “Rural areas have lots of forest”
Yea, but they do because not everybody is living there. If all the city people were moving to the countryside and building houses with big driveways and terraces like the country folk do, there would be much fewer forests.
That’s the point, I don’t know how to make it any clearer.
Cities are not the dirty hellholes you seem to think they are. Pollution doesn’t come from cities, it comes from power plants and factories. And that’s a totally solvable problem
I have actually seen this with concrete, but it is usually grass without trees. However, it isn't really the point. The point is this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/13/climate/clima...
Many cities have obvious low-hanging fruit. SF is full of 1-3 story housing that could easily be made much denser.
Instead we've created a system where the lucky few whose parents bought housing years ago in desirable areas inherit a ticket to opportunity in a city. That's fundamentally contrary to the ideals of the American Dream.
*Well I actually think this should be global, so I support open borders. But that's a tangent here.
Of course will a house in the middle of nowhere cheaper than those in better environments. But what worth has the better environment, when most people can't utilize it? At the end, this situation will lead to multiple other problems, like people avoiding overpriced areas, and instead travelling long distances to their workplace in those overpriced areas, which means they waste energy and pollute the environment, have less time for their family & socializing, and so on...
So it doesn't matter for what reason a city might exists or not. The question is which burden it puts on society and to which future it leads.
> But Manhattan and London have the highest house prices in their respective countries, primarily because of their density and the opportunities density provides.
....
> But if becoming just as big as Manhattan or London would make Oakland more expensive, shouldn’t we assume that a little step in that direction would make it a little bit more expensive?
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> No; I think the missing insight is that there’s some pool of geographically mobile Americans1 who are looking for new housing (or who might start looking if the right situation presented itself).
The way that an urban economist would put it is that fundamentally cities are job markets. I would put it a little more broadly and say that cities are opportunities markets. For that reason housing in a dense urban environment will never be as affordable as housing out in rural North Dakota.
If you build more housing in a city, more people move there, and the city becomes more desirable as a result, is the city better or worse off for having built the housing?