That’s the question asked here.
[N]ow the piggy bank is empty, the cards are maxed out, the NA meetings are every night at 7 and the house is upside-down. The layoffs are coming: will you be one of them or will you just be picking up a few extra hours of work to fill in for the ones who were? The slender times have begun. How will cities fare against the suburbs now? If cities really were an efficiency, a greener solution to a worn out and wasteful suburban culture, would not they have boomed in the early 90s and the late 70s? Where will Americans ride these times out? And will we learn anything from the collective experience of the past two decades?
The post advances some interesting criticisms of my own and theorizes about cities as arenas for leisure and consumption. As I hope my work makes clear, especially WYC, my viewpoint is that cities are primarily vehicles for productivity improvement and innovation, inspired by Jane Jacobs and especially Robert Lucas who famously theorized that:
The theory of production contains nothing to hold a city together. A city is simply a collection of factors of production – capital, people and land and people – and land is always far cheaper outside the city than inside. Why don’t capital and people move outside, combining themselves with cheaper land and thereby increasing profits? Of course people like to live near shopping and shops need to be located close to their customers, but circular considerations of this kind explain only shopping centers, not cities. Cities are centered on wholesale trade and primary producers and a theory that accounts for their existence has to explain why these producers are apparently choosing high rather than low cost modes of operation… It seems to me the ‘force’ we need to postulate for the central role of cities in economic life is of exactly the same character of ‘external human capital’ I have postulated as a force in aggregate development… What can people be paying Manhattan or downtown Chicago rents for if not to be around other people?
The theory of cities is a theory of production and development. They are one in the same thing.