Triumph of the City: How Urban Spaces Make Us Human
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Last annotated on June 23, 2016
INTRODUCTION: Our Urban SpeciesRead more at location 116
Note: Siamo in troppi? Domanda assurda dopo l'invenzione della città: tutta l'umanità potrebbe stare comodamente in Texas, ogni famiglia col suo comodo e spazioso appartamento. Il problema nn è dunque il numero delle xsone... L'innovatore impara x contatto e prossimità prima che x istruzione. Il talento è contagioso. Il talento x esprimersi deve verificare che può farlo, nemmeno lui crede alle sue potenzialità pratiche, da qui l'importanza di vivere dove il ghiaccio è già stato rotto... Paradosso: quanto + si è connessi, tanto più conta la prossimità fisica. Perchè? E si torna alla centralità delle idee... In città c'è poco spazio x cui si producono quei beni che occupano poco spazio: le idee nn ne occupano nessuno. Le idee fanno incontrare sviluppo e cultura in un mix stimolante... O-ring production: la concentrazione dei talenti consente ai migliori di lavorare insieme e quindi di nn sprecare i prodotti del genio con la rottura di anelli deboli... Quanto più un paese è "urbanizzato" tanto + è ricco e felice... L'arte rinsscimentale sarebbe stata concepibile senza una città come Firenze dove i geni erano a stretto contatto e si insegnavano a vicenda?... Torino, Detroit e il declino delle città. Una città rischia se si affida ad un unico progetto e declina con esso. Allo stesso modo nn può essere resuscitata con le grandi opere. È il pluralismo che vivifica una città xchè solo le diversità esaltano le interconnessioni... Qual è il marchio della città fallita? avere troppe infrastrutture (rispetto alla domanda) nn troppo poche. I grandi progetti sono rischiosi. Dopo una castrofe meglio dare aiuti alle persone che progettare a tavolino la ricostruzione (vedi Katrina)... Una città nn è fatta da case o infrastrutture ma da xsone: nn doniamo case o infrastrutture ma soldi ed education alle xsone più bisognose affinchè spendano indirizzando gli investimenti... E la povertà delle xiferie? La City attrae i poveri, nn li crea. Il povero di città è un ricco rispetto al povero di campagna. Contro i crimini e le malattie contagios il ruolo dello stato è decisivo, nn illudiamoci col libero mercato... Le ec. di scala della città favoriscono la cultura: musei, teatri... Limitare le costruzioni è una politica anti poveri che alza solo i prezzi, altro che "consumo del territorio". Le mille restrizioni sono anche fonte di corruzione. Ieri parigi ospitava la bohem, che ha dato lustro alla città, oggi è talmente "preservata" che un fenomeno del genere nn potrà più darsi... Un duello inatteso: grattacielo vs auto. Nel primo caso si va a piedi e la città è densa, popolata, viva - vedi Manhattan. Noi abbiamo scelto l'auto e le case basse. Forse era meglio limitare la circolazione piuttosto che l'edificabilità... Un' altra tendenza da combattere: la proprietà. È una tendenza che favorisve la villetta rispetto all'appartamento... Grattacielo verde. Basta con l'idea che l'ambientalista viva tra gli albrri. Gli abitanti delle grandi città sono i veri ambientalisti: vivere ammasssti fa risparmiare risorse. Vivere nella cintura o in campagna incide molto di + sull' ambiente. Preghiamo che India e Cina optino x grattacieli e città ad alta densità abitativa... Vuok preservare l'ambiente stoppando nuove costruzioni in città. Bene, stai solo inquinando di più il pianeta incentivando costruzioni in periferia Edit
Thirty-six million people live in and around Tokyo, the most productive metropolitan area in the world.Read more at location 118
On a planet with vast amounts of space (all of humanity could fit in Texas—each of us with a personal townhouse),Read more at location 120
Although it has become cheaper to travel long distances, or to telecommute from the Ozarks to Azerbaijan, more and more people are clustering closerRead more at location 121
Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace. The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance, and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution.Read more at location 123
In the world’s poorer places, cities are expanding enormously because urban density provides the clearest path from poverty to prosperity.Read more at location 128
For every Fifth Avenue, there’s a Mumbai slum; for every Sorbonne, there’s a D.C. high school guarded by metal detectors.Read more at location 133
Indeed, for many Americans, the latter half of the twentieth century—the end of the industrial age—was an education not in urban splendor but in urban squalor.Read more at location 134
My passion for the urban world began with the New York of Ed Koch, Thurman Munson, and Leonard Bernstein.Read more at location 137
Why do the richest and poorest people in the world so often live cheek by jowl?Read more at location 141
Thirty years ago, New York City’s future looked far less bright. Like almost every colder, older city, Gotham seemed to be a dinosaur.Read more at location 152
It was a trading village where a hodgepodge of adventurers came to make fortunes swapping beads for furs. Those mercantile Dutch settlers clustered together because proximity made it easier to exchange goods and ideas and because there was safety behind the town’s protective wall (now Wall Street).Read more at location 157
Just as globalization killed off New York’s advantages as a manufacturing hub, it increased the city’s edge in producing ideas.Read more at location 185
While there isn’t much sewing left in New York, there are still plenty of Calvin Kleins and Donna Karans, producing designs that will often be made on the other side of the planet.Read more at location 186
New York reinvented itself during the bleak years of the 1970s when a cluster of financial innovators learned from each other and produced a chain of interconnected ideas. Academic knowledge about trading off risk and return made it easier to evaluate and sell riskier assets,Read more at location 189
Many of the biggest innovators acquired their knowledge not through formal training but by being close to the action,Read more at location 192
New York introduces us to the central paradox of the modern metropolis—proximity has become ever more valuable as the cost of connecting across long distances has fallen.Read more at location 199
In this book, we’ll look closely at what makes cities our species’ greatest invention.Read more at location 202
They enable us to work and play together, and their success depends on the demand for physical connection.Read more at location 206
Within the United States, workers in metropolitan areas with big cities earn 30 percent more than workers who aren’t in metropolitan areas.Read more at location 210
In America and Europe, cities speed innovation by connecting their smart inhabitants to each other, but cities play an even more critical role in the developing world: They are gateways between markets and cultures.Read more at location 216
By concentrating so much talent in one place, Bangalore makes it easier for that talent to teach itself and for outsiders, whether from Singapore or Silicon Valley, to connect easily with Indian human capital.Read more at location 223
Echoing antiurbanites throughout the ages, Mahatma Gandhi said that “the true India is to be found not in its few cities, but in its 700,000 villages” and “the growth of the nation depends not on cities, but [on] its villages.”Read more at location 224
There is a near-perfect correlation between urbanization and prosperity across nations.Read more at location 227
Across countries, reported life satisfaction rises with the share of the population that lives in cities, even when controlling for the countries’ income and education.Read more at location 233
An explosion of artistic genius during the Florentine Renaissance began when Brunelleschi figured out the geometry of linear perspective.Read more at location 237
Their friend Masaccio then brought the innovation into painting. The artistic innovations of Florence were glorious side effects of urban concentration;Read more at location 239
Today, however, Bangalore and New York and London all depend on their ability to innovate. The spread of knowledge from engineer to engineer, from designer to designer, from trader to trader is the same as the flight of ideas from painter to painter, and urban density has long been at the heart of that process.Read more at location 240
The failure of Detroit and so many other industrial towns doesn’t reflect any weakness of cities as a whole, but rather the sterility of those cities that lost touch with the essential ingredients of urban reinvention.Read more at location 245
inventors—Henry Ford was just one among many gifted entrepreneurs. But the extravagant success of Ford’s big idea destroyed that older, more innovative city.Read more at location 248
hundreds of thousands of less-well-educated workers to vast factories, which became fortresses apart from the city and the world. While industrial diversity, entrepreneurship, and education lead to innovation, the Detroit model led to urban decline.Read more at location 249
Too many officials in troubled cities wrongly imagine that they can lead their city back to its former glories with some massive construction project—a new stadium or light rail system, a convention center, or a housing project.Read more at location 252
The hallmark of declining cities is that they have too much housing and infrastructure relative to the strength of their economies.Read more at location 256
New Orleans’ greatness always came from its people, not from its buildings.Read more at location 262
Ultimately, the job of urban government isn’t to fund buildings or rail lines that can’t possibly cover their costs, but to care for the city’s citizens. A mayor who can better educate a city’s children so that they can find opportunity on the other side of the globe is succeeding, even if his city is getting smaller.Read more at location 263
not all urban poverty is bad. It’s easy to understand why a visitor to a Kolkata slum might join Gandhi in wondering about the wisdom of massive urbanization, but there’s a lot to like about urban poverty. Cities don’t make people poor; they attract poor people.Read more at location 266
Urban poverty should be judged not relative to urban wealth but relative to rural poverty.Read more at location 271
Proximity makes it easier to exchange ideas or goods but also easier to exchange bacteria or purloin a purse. All of the world’s older cities have suffered the great scourges of urban life: disease, crime, congestion.Read more at location 275
American cities became much healthier in the early twentieth century because they were spending as much on water as the federal government spent on everything except the military and the postal service.Read more at location 278
Urban scale makes it possible to support the fixed costs of theaters, museums, and restaurants.Read more at location 282
Many of the ideas in this book draw on the wisdom of the great urbanist Jane Jacobs, who knew that you need to walk a city’s streets to see its soul.Read more at location 300
When the demand for a city rises, prices will rise unless more homes are built. When cities restrict new construction, they become more expensive.Read more at location 304
A big reason for those sight lines is that any attempt to build in Paris must go through a byzantine process that puts preservation first.Read more at location 307
Paris—once famously hospitable to starving artists—is now affordable only to the wealthy.Read more at location 309
Like Paris, London has a strong attachment to its nineteenth-century edifices. The Prince of Wales himself took a strong stand against tall, modernist buildingsRead more at location 309
This self-destructive behavior practically ensures prices that are too high,Read more at location 314
Brilliant architects, like William Van Alen, designed great skyscrapers like the Chrysler Building, and others, like Le Corbusier, planned a world built at staggering heights. But twentieth-century urban America didn’t belong to the skyscraper; it belonged to the car. Transportation technologies have always determined urban form. In walking cities, like central Florence or Jerusalem’s old city, the streets are narrow, winding, and crammed with shops. When people had to use their legs to get around, they tried to get as close as possible to each other and to the waterways that provided the fastest way into or out of the city.Read more at location 318
Cities built around the car, like much of Los Angeles and Phoenix and Houston, have enormous, gently curving roads and often lack sidewalks. In those places, shops and pedestrians retreat from the streets into malls.Read more at location 324
While older cities usually have an obvious center, dictated by an erstwhile port or a rail station, car cities do not.Read more at location 326
the rise of car-based living was bad for many older cities, it wasn’t bad for everyone.Read more at location 330
Speed and space are the two big advantages of car-based living. The average commute by public transportation in the United States is forty-eight minutes; the average commute by car is twenty-four minutes. Cars enable mass-produced housing at moderate densities that give ordinary Americans a lifestyle that is extraordinarily opulent by world standards.Read more at location 332
The spirit of Thomas Jefferson, who liked cities no more than Gandhi did, lives on in policies that subsidize home ownership and highways, implicitly encouraging Americans to abandon cities.Read more at location 337
One problem with policies that subsidize sprawl is that car-based living imposes environmental costs on the entire planet.Read more at location 338
Manhattan and downtown London and Shanghai, not suburbia, are the real friends of the environment.Read more at location 343
Nature lovers who live surrounded by trees and grass consume much more energy than their urban counterparts,Read more at location 344
If the environmental footprint of the average suburban home is a size 15 hiking boot, the environmental footprint of a New York apartment is a stiletto-heel size 6 Jimmy Choo.Read more at location 345
Good environmentalism requires a worldwide perspective and global action, not the narrow outlook of a single neighborhood trying to keep out builders. We must recognize that if we try to make one neighborhood greener by stopping new building, we can easily make the world browner, by pushing new development to someplace far less environmentally friendly.Read more at location 351
But as India and China get richer, their people will face a choice that could dramatically affect all our lives. Will they follow America and move toward car-based exurbs or stick with denser urban settings that are far more environmentally friendly?Read more at location 359
we must be more tolerant of tearing down the short buildings in cities in order to build tall ones,Read more at location 365
The strength that comes from human collaboration is the central truth behind civilization’s success and the primary reason why cities exist.Read more at location 368
We must discard the view that environmentalism means living around trees and that urbanites should always fight to preserve a city’s physical past. We must stop idolizing home ownership, which favors suburban tract homes over high-rise apartments, and stop romanticizing rural villages.Read more at location 370
We should eschew the simplistic view that better long-distance communication will reduce our desire and need to be near one another.Read more at location 372
Above all, we must free ourselves from our tendency to see cities as their buildings,Read more at location 373
