29th
Edward Glaeser: ‘Cities Are Making Us More Human’
Illustration: “The elevated sidewalk: How it will solve city transportation problems”, Scientific American, vol. 109 (July-Dec 1913)
“As opposed to the conventional wisdom, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser believes urbanization to be a solution to many unanswered problems, such as pollution, depression and a lack of creativity. (…)
Living around trees and living in low density areas may end being actually quite harmful for the environment, whereas living in high-rise buildings and urban core may end up being quite kind to the environment. (…)
People who live in urban apartments all typically use less electricity at home and less energy at home heating than people who live in larger suburban or rural homes. A single family detached house uses on average 83% more electricity than urban apartments do within the United States. (…)
Q: How are cities making us smarter?
Glaeser: I think the most important thing cities do today is to allow the creation of new ideas. Chains of collaborative brilliance have always been responsible for human kind’s greatest hits. We have seen this in cities for millennia – Socrates and Plato bickered on an Athenian street corner; we saw it again in Florence with the ideas that went from Brunelleschi to Donatello to Masaccio to Filippino Lippi and to the Florentine Renaissance. It helps us to know each other, learn from each other and to collectively create something great. In some sense, cities are making us more human.
Our greatest asset as a species is the ability to learn from the people around us. We come out of the womb with this remarkable ability to take in information from those people – parents, peers, teachers – that are near us. Cities enable us to get smart by being around other smart people. I think this explains why cities have not become obsolete over the past thirty years. (…) We have just crossed the half-way point where more than 50% of humanity lives in cities. (…)
Source: Ethan Zuckerman, Desperately Seeking Serendipity, 12.V.2011
These facts are related to the role cities play today, a role very much tied to the generation of information. Globalization and new technologies did make the industrial city obsolete, at least in the West. But they also increased the idea of returns of human capital and innovation. You could sell something on the other side of the planet because you could produce it on the other side of the planet. By making knowledge more valuable, they made cities more important. That is why they continue to play the incredibly important role of connecting people, enabling them to learn from one another at close distances. (…)
I also want to emphasize that cities are often places of significant and often positive political change. One thing that those countries need is political change, which is much more likely to come out of an organized urban group than it is to come from a dispersed agricultural population. (…)
If you compare countries that are more than 50% urbanized with countries that are less than 50% urbanized, incomes are five times higher in the more urbanized countries and infant mortality rates are less than a third in the more urbanized countries. The path of rural poverty really is awful. (…)”
— Edward Glaeser, economist at Harvard University, “Cities Are Making Us More Human”, The European, 20.12.2011.
