Embrace the city. . .

American history and psyche has been shaped by a bias toward all things rural. 

Cities are usually seen as negative. 

The country regarded as positive. 

Whatever your point of view (I prefer cities!), the essential role of urban centers, culture and economics in shaping life, health and progress is simply undeniable.  Especially important is the role of dense population centers in creativity and entrepreneurial breakthroughs.  Our needs in today's shrinking, complicated, interdependent world argue for more density, for greater proximity. 

Edward Glaeser would agree.  Consider his evaluation of cities and our future as a nation.  Let me hear your reactions. 

America’s Revival Begins in its Cities


December 30, 2010
by Edward Glaeser
Boston Globe
Published in the Harvard Kennedy School journal

DURING ECONOMIC downturns, we begin to fear that we are entering a permanent period of decline. But we can avoid that depressing prospect if we recognize that a revival will not come from federal spending or another building boom. Reinvention requires a new wave of innovation and entrepreneurship, which can emerge from our dense metropolitan areas and their skilled residents. America must stop treating its cities as ugly stepchildren, and should instead cherish them as the engines that power our economy.

America’s 12 largest metropolitan areas collectively produced 37 percent of the country’s output in 2008, the last year with available data. Per capita productivity was particularly high in large, skilled areas such as Boston, where output per person was 39 percent higher than the nation’s metropolitan average. New York and San Francisco enjoy similar per capita productivity advantages. Boston also seems to be moving past the current recession, with an unemployment rate well below the national average of 9.8 percent.

Since 1948, the national unemployment rate has exceeded 9 percent only one other time: the grave 1982 recession. During the 1980s, we looked at Japan and saw an economy that seemed to be surpassing our own. Today, we watch with unease as China surges.

Yet American decline is not inevitable. During the 25 years after 1982, our real gross domestic product increased by 3.3 percent per year, which was also the rate of growth during the quarter century before 1982. Our post-1982 growth involved massive economic restructuring. Manufacturing employment fell by 39 percent from its peak of 19.4 million jobs in 1979. The 1979-2009 manufacturing decline was more than offset by the 126 percent increase in employment in “professional and business services” and the 184 percent increase in education and health jobs.

Boston provides a model of how cities can foster such transformations. In the 1970s, Boston seemed headed for the trash-heap of history. Manufacturing jobs had vanished, and social chaos ensued. But Greater Boston experienced three great decades, as a former industrial hub became a capital of the information age. Our area’s high levels of productivity reflect the value of ideas that are made in Boston.

To succeed in the future, the country needs to produce a stream of new ideas, like personal computers, Facebook, and steerable catheters. We must produce goods and services innovative enough to command the high prices needed to cover high labor costs.

Such breakthroughs rarely come from solitary geniuses. The movie “The Social Network” hints at the messy, interactive process that created Facebook, which now has over 500 million users and is valued at about $40 billion. Mark Zuckerberg benefited from being surrounded by smart peers, whose ideas about social networking helped his company get started.

The roots of Boston Scientific reveal a similarly collaborative process that started in the basement of a Belmont church. The brilliant inventor (and spiritualist) Itzhak Bentov created a steerable catheter, catering to the demands of Boston’s medical community. Boston connected Bentov with John Abele, who brought his business vision, and later connected Abele with other partners, who helped him create a medical innovation behemoth.

Cities have long enabled economic creativity. Detroit in 1900 looked a lot like Silicon Valley in the 1960s, with an entrepreneur on every street corner. In that urban hotbed, innovators like Ford and Buick and the Fisher Brothers supplied and financed each other — and borrowed ideas freely. The urban edge in engendering innovation explains why globalization and technology have made cities more, not less, important. The returns to being smart have increased, and humans get smart by being around smart people in cities. While all workers in the Boston area benefit from the region’s human capital, the flow of knowledge seems strongest in the dense clusters of Boston and Cambridge.

For decades, the American dream has meant white picket fences and endless suburbs. But the ideas created in dense metropolitan areas power American productivity. We should reduce the pro-homeownership bias of housing policies, such as the home mortgage interest deduction, which subsidize suburban sprawl and penalize cities. We should rethink infrastructure policies that encourage Americans to move to lower-density environments. Most importantly, we should invest and innovate more in education, because human capital is the ultimate source of both urban and national strength.

As we grope towards a brighter future, we must embrace our cities, and invest in the skills that are central to their success.

Edward Glaeser is a professor of economics at Harvard and director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Govern­ment and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, both at Harvard Kennedy School.

Detroit: Model for urban redesign?

The work that urban designer Toni Griffin engages in these days is very interesting, challenging and nothing short of huge and amazing!  Thinking, working and organizing at this level is what it will take to renew the urban core of most American cities today.  After you've read the interview, let me know your reactions.  In my view, this is fascinating stuff.

Can This Planner Save Detroit?

Toni L. Griffin has just accepted a unique—and daunting—job: the reshaping of Detroit. She talks to ARCHITECT about population decline, urban ag, downtown’s revival, and more.
By: Fred A. Bernstein

Time magazine called Toni L. Griffin a “star urban planner,” which doesn’t have quite the same ring as “starchitect,” but properly describes the 46-year-old. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where she still teaches, Griffin began her career in the private sector, working first for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in her native Chicago. While at SOM, she helped turn the Renaissance Center, John Portman’s office and hotel complex in downtown Detroit, into General Motors Co.’s world headquarters.

From SOM, she went to work for the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation, focusing on planning and heritage tourism initiatives, and then to the Washington, D.C., planning office, where she oversaw redevelopment projects. From Washington, she moved to Newark, N.J., where, within three years, the planning office she rebuilt was winning awards—among them, an award from the New Jersey chapter of the American Planning Association for its work on sustainable infill housing guidelines.

This spring, Griffin signed on for what may be America’s toughest urban planning challenge: helping to remake Detroit, a city that has seen its population decline by half over 60 years. In September, Griffin helped Mayor Dave Bing’s administration launch the Detroit Works Project, a 12- to 18-month effort to map the city’s future. It began with a series of widely attended public forums.

A Manhattan resident, Griffin spends most of the week in an office in Detroit City Hall. In an arrangement that reflects the strong interest of philanthropists in Detroit’s future, her salary is paid by the Kresge Foundation (which has an endowment of over $3 billion). Rip Rapson, Kresge’s president and son of architect Ralph Rapson, is also giving the city funds for Griffin to hire a team of local, national, and international consultants, from the private sector and four Michigan universities. Several other foundations are expected to provide funding to support both the technical and civic engagement components of the project.

Author Fred A. Bernstein first met Griffin in 2004, when they were both participants in the Mayors’ Institute on City Design in Charleston, S.C. She spoke to him on a recent weekend from her apartment in Harlem.

How did the Detroit job come about?

When Mayor Bing began his first full term in January, leaders of the private sector were determined to help him tackle the extraordinary challenges facing Detroit. At the same time, Kresge and other foundations wanted to make sure their investments aligned with the city’s needs, both programmatically and spatially.

This leadership saw now as the opportunity create a shared vision for the city, across sectors and inclusive of broad civic engagement. I was asked to join the mayor’s team to assemble and manage a team to create this vision with members of his staff.

To read the entire interview click here.

How about a one state country. . .ready for density?

Talk about density and urban planning!

Since I'm not sure everyone can read the text, here's what it says from left to right across the page after this header line:

There are about 300,000,000 of us in the USA, spread out over 3,794,101 sq miles. . .

But let's say we all wanted to live in 1 sate together, comfortably.

Using the density of Brooklyn, NY as an example: at about 35,000 people to a square mile. . .

What state wold we all fit into?

In other words if we wanted to we could all move into and live in an area the size of New Hampshire; the 5th smallest US state (8,968 sq miles) with extra room for more parks. (because Brooklyn cold use more)

And if the area were square, it would be about 100 miles wide. You could ride a bike to the other side for the "country" in a day. Our "green belt" would be the rest of the USA. Not only would we all have access to mass transit and live in spaces with small footprints, the need for Air travel would be greatly reduced. You'd only fly when leaving the country. WE'D ALL BE NEIGHBORS.

What do you think? Any urban planners out there?