Ed Glaeser1 was just over at Economix discussing his latest book, the title of which, Triumph of the City, offers a startlingly frank description of the kind of exultant and uncritical urban hubris which is Glaeser’s signature argument. Glaeser is a fine economist—indeed, I often point to his research on inequality in New York, as he himself does in this interview—but he’s yoked his credentials as an urban economist into the service of his public fame as an urban cheerleader. There’s nothing inherently wrong, of course, about using research to service ideology. It just happens that this is an ideology I disagree with.
I don’t want to go in for full-throated anti-urbanism in criticizing Glaeser.2 What I do want to go in for is a suggestion that Glaeser is peddling a kind of lifestyle marketing that offers more insights into how he and the members of his social class enjoy living rather than any critical perspectives on how best to organize populations in space.3 Glaeser loves cities because they can be exciting, entrepreneurial, and full of fun things for professors to do in their leisure hours, like food trucks (his example, not mine). The yokels may be content with their Cracker Barrels and their strip malls out in the country—but for us, for the creative class, cities are where new ideas and synergies are dynamically paradigmated and leveraged through the networked mobility of lifestyle shapers in the knowledge economy.
If all that sounds like it was swiped off of a PowerPoint slide from the owners of a new office development, it’s because Glaeser’s arguments are increasingly nothing more than cover for consumer-class dreams of urban gloss. For the types of urban spaces that are occupied by Glaeser and his peers, galloping free-marketeerism undoubtedly produces the best outcomes. Fashionable condominiums with exercise rooms, strips of gastro-pubs with private leafy courtyards, converted industrial buildings for Internet startups, converted tenement homes for their graphic designers—these are all things which the private development industry is exceedingly good at providing in high quality. And so Glaeser comes out swinging against all manner of administrative meddling in urban affairs: construction regulation, preservation districts, rent control, and, astoundingly, even the very concept of zoning itself.
It’s at times like these that it’s abundantly clear that Glaeser is an economist and not a historian. His heart-throb New York City already had an experiment with a slack regulatory regime. It was called the nineteenth century, and, for the vast majority of the city’s population, it was awful. We know what it looks like when the profit motive is allowed to govern urban development, and it looks like a city with one half that caters well to the fashionable creative class amenities that Glaeser imagines, and another choked by substandard slums built to make a quick penny. Glaeser name-checks Jane Jacobs in the interview, and it’s no surprise that he does, for Jacobs is the wellspring of misdirected localism, and the fairy godmother of the most tragic design movement of our time, New Urbanism. It’s no surprise that the urban vision proposed by both the New Urbanists and Glaeser is sold in the language of entrepreneurialism, entertainment, and schools for high-achieving young pupils. It’s an urbanity that works very well for the sort of people who write books and consider themselves “urbanists”, as well as their friends, but it tends not to work out so well for everyone else.
Glaeser dreams of a “progressive-libertarian alliance” that will mold the urban policy of the future, but it’s hard to see what part of his vision would be truly compelling to progressives—or that would require any compromise amongst libertarians. His policy suggestions are really not much more than “libertarianism with bicycle lanes and coffee-shops”. And the fact that so many liberal voices have been so eager to pipe up in support of Glaeser’s vision speaks unhappy volumes about how easily liberalism can be intellectually bribed by the promise of good falafel.
- Who, I see, has had his moment on the silver screen cruelly throttled in the censor’s grip. ↩
- Though I wonder whether the hordes of college graduates who stream each year into New York, Los Angeles, and Boston rather than Wyoming and Appalachia failed to notice the oppressive urban bias which Glaeser protests is strangling America. ↩
- I was going to jokingly call Glaeser “Richard Florida with a doctorate”, but it turns out, to my shock, that Richard Florida has a doctorate. ↩
http://viewshed.matinic.us/2011/02/24/165/