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.
September 24th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Cities will always be able to hold their own – their future is not bleak by any means.
September 24th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Interesting points but overly nasty (i.e., “homos [in the suburbs have] far fewer cruisy parks and sex clubs”) and over-simplified. The “Big City equals Sodom” argument is both a cliché and a myth. As the most cursory perusal of the Internet will confirm (see: Craigslist), big cities hardly have a monopoly on debauchery and other vices.
The fundamental flaw in his argument is his attempt to divorce leisure from aesthetics. He writes, “People take extraordinary pains to find a city that ‘fits them’, and this is done not for industrious or philosophic, or even usually aesthetic, reasons, as much as it is simple considerations of desired leisure activity.”
This may be true for a philistine (I use this term to mean “a person who is disdainful of intellectual or artistic values”), but many people move to big cities precisely for philosophic and aesthetic reasons. For example, for many urban denizens, walkability is a “philosophic and aesthetic” value that also has a leisure component. How can it be quantified since does not fit into a narrow, Libertarian, cost/benefit analysis that only values convenience and affordability?
September 28th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
I think you’re mistaking the focus of my rant. I was trying to speak for those who do not have a choice – eg, the ‘uncreative class’ who live where they have to live rather than being fickle and transient in the mould of the wealthy urban class most modern urban writers focus almost exclusively on.