Triumph of The City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (2011)

Triumph of The City author Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economics professor, Manhattan Institute senior fellow, and contributing editor to public policy magazine City Journal, has made a career of studying urban areas and how they grow, thrive, and contribute to civilization and human prosperity. Glaeser believes “ideas spread easily in dense environments” (272), and that cities are the ideal place for such creative innovation. 

Architecture critic Jane Jacobs took issue with New York’s policy of replacing old, multi-use neighborhoods with sterile single-use skyscraper districts. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities argues that sidewalks and street life are the essence of the urban experience. Jacobs theorized that dense cities are more environmentally friendly than spread-out suburbs, but that high-rise neighborhoods with more than 200 households per acre—greater than about six stories in height—create lonely sterility. Glaeser counters that high-rise areas can solve the sterility problem with plenty of ground-floor shopping, restaurants, and night life, and that a mix of taller and shorter residential structures adds variety and choice to a city. 

From 1974 to 1994, Coleman Young served five consecutive terms as mayor of Detroit; he tried to address the problems of poverty and loss of manufacturing jobs by increasing taxes on wealthier residents and building new construction and transit systems in the downtown area.