Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier

A mayor who can better educate a city’s children so that they can find opportunity on the other side of the globe is succeeding, even if his city is getting smaller.

Urban poverty should be judged not relative to urban wealth but relative to rural poverty.

London and Shanghai, not suburbia, are the real friends of the environment. Nature lovers who live surrounded by trees and grass consume much more energy than their urban counterparts, as I painfully discovered when, after thirty-seven years of almost entirely urban living, I recklessly experimented with suburban life. If the environmental footprin... See more

Because she saw that older, shorter buildings were cheaper, she incorrectly believed that restricting heights and preserving old neighborhoods would ensure affordability. That’s not how supply and demand work. When the demand for a city rises, prices will rise unless more homes are built. When cities restrict new construction, they become more expe... See more

you need to walk a city’s streets to see its soul.

The average commute by public transportation in the United States is forty-eight minutes; the average commute by car is twenty-four minutes.

Department of Energy data confirms that New York State’s per capita energy consumption is next to last in the country, which largely reflects public transit use in New York City.

Yet as people have become richer, they have increasingly chosen cities based on lifestyle—and the consumer city was born.

Now we know that the suburban environmentalists had it backward. Manhattan and downtown