Posted on 05/31/2016 5:00:27 AM PDT by Kaslin
Nearly a century ago, in 1920, the Census Bureau caused a ruckus when it announced that, for the first time, a majority of Americans lived in cities -- even though its definition of a city included every hamlet with a population of 2,500 and above.
Today a majority of Americans live in what are by any reasonable definition very large cities, metropolitan areas with populations above 1 million. But the urban planning profession remains fixated on just one small portion of these metropolises, the central city downtowns, though none outside New York contains more than 10 percent of metropolitan area jobs.
That's one of the lessons of Joel Kotkin's new book "The Human City," which takes a wider and longer view. Kotkin shows how cities developed as religious, imperial, commercial and industrial centers. And he shows how what planners disparage as suburbs and sprawl emerged a century ago as natural parts of the city -- and are now the home and workplace of the large majority of American city dwellers.
That's not how planners like to think about cities. Their focus is typically visual, and on the exterior of buildings and cityscape, easily reproduced in glossy coffee-table books, rather than on the interiors where people spend most of their hours. They take their cues from 20th century architects like Le Corbusier, who wanted to knock down all of Paris' historic structures and replace them with a few skyscrapers rising from parkland.
There is an obvious authoritarian thrust here. It is visible in Kotkin's home state of California, where zoning restrictions and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) protests prevent new construction in coastal metropolises. Gov. Jerry Brown is pushing policies that would concentrate new housing in high-rise clusters around mass transit stations, with ready access to bike paths and walking trails but not to streets and roads for private cars. It's a good thing to offer people such a choice. It's a bad thing to deny them any others.
The result is that housing costs in coastal metropolises have skyrocketed far above the level affordable for median-income singles, much less married couples with children. These cities are increasingly the home of the connected rich and the disconnected poor. They have the nation's highest levels of economic inequality and the highest percentage of singles. The central city of San Francisco has 80,000 more dogs than children.
As Kotkin points out, the rationales for confining development in this way don't stand up to scrutiny. It's argued that suburbs, whose residents drive dozens of miles each day, are more wasteful of energy than high-rise central cities. Data don't bear that out. It takes lots of energy to build and maintain the high-rises, more than enough to compensate for less driving.
Central cities are also portrayed as more ethnically diverse. But that's not necessarily true: As Kotkin notes, blacks have been moving to suburbs, and most Asian and Latino immigrants head there directly. Meanwhile, the hippest neighborhoods of San Francisco and Portland, Brooklyn and Boston are increasingly monochromatically white.
And it turns out that tightly packing people from various ethnic backgrounds into small central city neighborhoods doesn't promote harmonious interaction. On the contrary, as Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam found to his horror, it reduces social trust and social connectedness. People hunker down and avoid contact with others.
You get more social connectedness and higher levels of trust in the supposedly dreary and dull suburbs. One reason is that people with children tend to head toward the suburbs, and childrearing encourages participation in school- and church-related voluntary associations.
Another is that suburbs, unlike central cities or university campuses, actually have populations with diverse opinions. On any suburban cul-de-sac you can find people who vote both Republican and Democratic. Good luck trying that in Manhattan or Harvard.
To his subject Kotkin brings a useful worldwide perspective. He appreciates the strengths and shortcomings of Singapore, understands that most Europeans, like most Americans, live in suburbs and notes that population growth rates have been falling in megacities like Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Tokyo and Beijing, as well as in New York and Los Angeles. Some cities evidently get too big for people.
Which is Kotkin's point: Cities exist for people, not the other way around. He champions "urban pluralism," cities that have room for singles who think they're the wave of the future, and, especially, for parents who are actually creating and raising the citizens of the future.
Oh, a most perfect article to appeal to suburbanite and rural Freepers and New York City haters! Cities - eeeeeeevil!
... would concentrate new housing in high-rise clusters....
With liberals, it’s always about telling us where to live, how to live, how to raise our kids, how to travel, what to do to conform with their “better” ideas and plans for us,
what to think, what to say and what words must and must not be used, and how they can run our lives better than we can, or else.
It’s all about control of every facet of our lives from cradle to grave.
I have a lot more confidence in the market figuring out what to build where than a bunch of bureaucrats trying to make that decision.
“High-rise clusters” = Oceania’s version of the concentration camp in leftist utopia.
Cities are not evil per se. Cities, American cities have developed very concentrated political power and have evolved into evil
Viewed as a political force driving American values, the City of New York ruled by Mayor De Blasio and refuge for the Old Gray Whore, CBS and NBC can be counted as evil
That power expressed as Black Power in Baltimore is evil. In Chicago the power is powerless or doesn’t give a damn about the war killing young black men.
Cities are corrupt political machines that are able to concentrate the political will to influence elections legally and illegally. It is that corruption on which Hillary is counting to assure victory
If you choose to live in the city, fine. If you choose to live rural, that’s fine too. But, liberals- don’t you DARE tell me where to live. Civil wars have started over less.
CC
I disagree with that point of view. Cities in the United States, despite problems, are repositories of vibrant culture - including architecture. People can easily educate themselves by simply looking at the real estate section of the New York Times (one of the few sections of the paper that is still outstanding).
Oh, and please, no private message either with links to one’s own writings. I won't read them.
A definition of “city” is “dirty, noisy, crowded, crime ridden, target rich environment”.
The cost of cities near me are at least 3-4 times the costs in my rural county. Money is a good proxy for energy, whether it is wasted running empty buses, bureaucrats sitting around in the A/C, laborers watching the backhoe tear up a road (they are always tearing up the road), or the awful traffic. The 3-4x is just what shows up in taxes, the other costs of living are also higher.
It’s a matter of choice. And how dare any progressive try to take away my wife or daughters “RIGHT TO CHOOSE” where they’d like to live.
Why would ANYONE want to live in a city?
They are just high-density loonie bins.
They way it happens here is that young singles move into the city to be “hip” and close to the cultural events and nightlife.
Eventually they marry, and the day they learn the stork is coming they make a beeline for the suburbs.
One major reason....the urban public school system has utterly collapsed.
Well, gee, you, what’s the point of even posting?
So we get you defend cities. Cool.
But Free Republic is primarily a website of people reply to each other over the contents of an article.
You want to tell us how you feel, but demand we don’t reply.
Must be nice to be a Queen.
The culture won’t be so vibrant when the SHTF and you are trapped in an urban hell hole.
This is an excellent article. Anyone familiar with the trendy tyranny of Urbanists welcomes this clear recognition that cities are more than tightly packed urban cores of conforming automatons. Thomas Jefferson warned about such prisons that control freaks love to control. The writer defies the car-hating Urbanist orthodoxy by championing the various choices of free individuals.
What's just as bad, and what they want to do is to move the city dwellers out to where you want to live.
We are currently trapped in suburban Atlanta trying to flee to the country.
They forget that - for every high rise apartment, there are 20 floors below with apartments that face the brick wall of the building next door... You know, where the “ little people” live...
Yes, yes, my apartment is a hell hole. How could you tell?
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