Triumph of the City – Ed Glaeser

This new book celebrates how cities have made civilisation and fostered human endeavour. It is a readable and exciting book and I agree with many of its propositions. But what it has made me reflect on is the concepts of necessary and sufficient. In his book, Glaeser concentrates on the need for skilled citizens and education. He argues convincingly that this is essential for growth and city success. He is surely right.

But there are other necessities too. Not all of these come over clearly enough in my view, although they are certainly present. He writes about the rise of consumer cities, places where the ability to consume a desirable variety of goods and services makes them good places to be and thus generate the contacts which produce innovation and ideas.

In fact, cities started as consumer cities, places where the elite created the opportunity to make and consume luxury goods. What is fascinating is how long they took to create production cities, where this contact made it possible to have ideas and get them to function. The Roman Empire had very successful cities but couldn’t create the Industrial Revolution. This took considerable historical contingency – accidents perhaps in one reading – which came together to create the explosive growth which has reduced infant mortality, raised living standards and lengthened our lives.

Two elements are key to this contingency, communications and harnessing energy. Both are as essential as skills and education. Communications are both short and long range. Short range communication is about creating ideas and how to use them. Long range is about the ability to exploit these ideas and make them work. Small groups can get together and have all kinds of insight. Without longer range communication, nothing will happen. The internet and the world wide web have harnessed ideas in a wider and wider way, and follow on in the long road from printing, from the telegraph and telephone as well as physical communication as ways of communicating and expressing our ideas.

Glaeser tells how New York grew rich on pirating British novels – and indeed Rudyard Kipling complains about such piracy – this is precisely about harnessing ideas effectively.
Energy is the other pre-requisite. Tractors replaces horses in agriculture and transformed agricultural productivity, as indeed horses had done in medieval times. Electricity made elevators possible and the density of occupation in city centres which Glaeser extols. Fossil fuels have a productivity which nothing else has so far matched. All the education in the world will not help us when the lights go out.

The education and communication might help us create the new technologies which could replace such fuel, although we are still a distance from doing so. So we need three things – skills, communication and energy.

Ed Glaeser has focussed on the first of these. I suspect that this is partly because in the US they are still very rich in communications and energy infrastructures. However, in other countries the balance might be different. In the UK, the physical and energy infrastructure needs as much attention as the skills.