In Age of the City, Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin examines transformation in cities around the world from ancient China to the industrial age in the West and through to the present day. The book is a compelling, hopeful study of innovation and resilience in cities that offers a blueprint of how we can build more sustainable urban futures, writes Jeff Roquen.
In a metropolitan area of approximately 22 million people, Mexico City ranks as not only one of the three largest cities in the world but also one of the most difficult infrastructures to maintain. Since the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, the elimination of rivers, swamps and vast acreages of wetlands in the name of a European notion of “progress” – commercial development, industrial manufacturing and concrete – has set the stage for water scarcity. The recent acceleration of climate change and its attendant high temperatures has caused rapid desiccation of land in Mexico. As a result of this, combined with lower levels of rainfall and decaying aquafers Mexico City now rations water on a regular basis. Today, hundreds of cities around the globe face similar, simmering crises related to resource management, job creation, affordable housing and new dimensions of human alienation.
Since the publication of The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford in 1961, debates have reignited over how cities contribute to and/or detrimentally affect our civic and socio-economic lives. Over the past two decades, right-wing populists have often castigated cities as overcrowded, elite-dominated repositories of crime, undocumented immigrants and failed progressive policies – inconsistent and at odds with the “traditional” more conservative values of the larger nation. In Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together, an Oxford University professor and a contributor to The Economist, Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin respectively, attempt to rehabilitate the place and role of urban centres in society on a historical-level and offer a blueprint to remediate current challenges.
Since the mass exodus of white, urban professionals from the cities to the ever-expanding suburbs from the 1950s toward the end of the 20th century a resurgence of cities began in the 1990s
After setting the parameters of their study over the initial dozen pages, the authors begin by highlighting the impact of the often-overlooked impact of climate change throughout the centuries in Chapter Two (Engines of Progress). Yu the Great of the Xia Dynasty (said to be the first dynasty in classical Chinese historiography c 2050 BC) is celebrated for his efforts to successfully engineer flood control in ancient China (20-21). As populations battled to control and harness nature, cities formed from ancient Greece to The Renaissance to serve as centres of learning, hubs of commercial trade and capitals to govern territories and empires. In the ninth century, Baghdad (Iraq) exemplified the civilisational power of a city in its prodigious scholarship and artistic achievement and became a cosmopolitan destination for talented artists and savants from afar. By the advent of the Industrial Age in the late 18th century, the division of labour and rise of manufacturing defined many towns and cities, and the production of textiles, machinery and other goods created a robust network of trade and financial links throughout Europe and the United States to expand trade and end scarcity to a significant degree (25-31).
In Chapter Three (Levelling Up) and Four (Divided Cities), the authors begin by recalling the detrimental effects of de-industrialisation from the 1960s onward. From Detroit to Pittsburgh, the migration of manufacturing jobs overseas eroded the tax bases of cities and towns across America’s heartland and relegated these once prosperous, working-class communities to urban blight, unemployment, higher crime rates and despair (37-42). At the same time, corporate America continued to consolidate production in various fields of technology – resulting in a growing chasm between college-educated, service economy professionals and a dwindling, underappreciated pool of factory and trade workers. In turn, a political path opened for right-wing populism steeped in anti-government and nativist rhetoric. Rather than being a baleful influence on American society, however, recent immigrants not only have not committed more crimes than longer-established American citizens (despite false claims to the contrary) but they have created new businesses and generated wealth disproportionate to their numbers. In fact, “63% of start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area were founded or co-founded by immigrants” (49).
Insufficient housing, inadequate employment opportunities and rising poverty levels plague many cities and communities – including Shanghai, Mumbai, Lagos and Rio de Janeiro
Since the mass exodus of white, urban professionals from the cities to the ever-expanding suburbs from the 1950s toward the end of the 20th century a resurgence of cities began in the 1990s, on which Goldin and Lee Devlin offer a salient analysis. Japan bolstered its teeming metropolises (Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama) with additional rail-lines (including high-speed trains) and improved its already highly regarded education system by replacing local, tax-based funding to public-financing of schools at the prefecture-level. As such, the Japanese educational system now operates on a far more egalitarian basis (75-76).
In Chapter Five (“Remote Work: The Threat to Cities”) and Chapter Six (“Cities, Cyberspace and the Future of Community”), the authors summarise the seismic shift of our social spheres as wrought by the digital age. From the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, government-imposed mitigation efforts drove work from the office to the private homes of millions of people worldwide. Consequently, a new era has emerged with less commuting road traffic and both a decline in worker productivity and a sharp increase in employee alienation due to the absent or infrequent in-person contract between workers. To combat the isolation produced by virtual connectivity, several companies, including Google, have developed office-centres for their remote-based workforces to gather, reconnect and team-build (89-103).
City-dwellers and their elected representatives clearly face a series of critical policy decisions with respect to preservation and quality of life for all eight billion people on the planet
Toward the end of the book, Goldin and Lee-Devin reach their scholarly stride by delivering a robust investigation into the widening disparity of wealth (Chapter Seven: Beyond the Rich World), threats to global health (Chapter Eight: The Specter of Disease). As a result of the ongoing trend of metropolitan expansion and spikes in the population densities of cities in Asia, Africa and South America, air pollution, insufficient housing, inadequate employment opportunities and rising poverty levels plague many cities and communities – including Shanghai, Mumbai, Lagos and Rio de Janeiro. (107-122) Despite significant progress in reducing mortality rates through national vaccination programs over the past two centuries, urban sprawl, the closer proximity of animals to humans with an attendant higher possibility of virus transmission and the emergence of fact-free, anti-vaccination propaganda online has made human beings more vulnerable to diseases and future pandemics (137-140).
In turning to “A Climate of Peril” in Chapter Nine, the authors paint a harrowing picture of the threat of climate change and the efforts by cities to remediate its impact. After decades of largely unchecked carbon emission into the atmosphere, extreme weather has become the norm with often devastating consequences – including the loss of more than 1,800 lives in Hurricane Katrina (New Orleans, 2005). In the same year London reached a record 40 degrees Celsius over a summer of blistering heat (2022), entire communities were washed away from massive downpours and floods in Pakistan (149-150). As cities account for 70 per cent of Carbon emissions, Goldin and Lee-Devlin rightly advocate the replacement of fossil-fuel reliant automobiles with train networks and also highlight greater opportunities for recycling (161-163).
In Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus (c. 1602), one of the characters exclaims “What is a city but the people?”. From the pages of Age of the City, city-dwellers and their elected representatives clearly face a series of critical policy decisions with respect to preservation and quality of life for all eight billion people on the planet. In demonstrating how cities prove instrumental to the social, civilisational and economic growth of both nations and our international order, Goldin and Lee-Devlin have produced a superb study for academics, organisers and policymakers to reflect upon – and act upon – in reclaiming and/or further transforming urban areas into thriving centres of culture, tolerance and environmentally-sound living.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image: Andrea Leopardi on Unsplash.
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