Triumph of the City

Edward Glaeser is a Harvard economist who has spent his career studying cities, and Triumph of the City pulls together his arguments for general readers. His central claim is that dense urban living, despite all the obvious problems, has been the engine of human prosperity, innovation, and even environmental sustainability.

The book covers the history of cities from ancient Athens through modern Mumbai. Glaeser uses specific case studies to illustrate larger points. Why some cities decline and others rebound. Why building restrictions in coastal American cities push housing costs up. Why urbanization in the developing world is mostly a good thing for the planet.

Glaeser is a market-friendly economist, and that perspective is consistent throughout. Readers from other intellectual traditions will sometimes disagree.

For readers who liked Jane Jacobs’s classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, this is a different argument from a different angle on overlapping ground.