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

The hallmark of declining cities is that they have too much housing and infrastructure relative to the strength of their economies. With all that supply of structure and so little demand, it makes no sense to use public money to build more supply. The folly of building-centric urban renewal reminds us that cities aren’t structures; cities are peopl... See more

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

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

American cities became much healthier in the early twentieth century because they were spending as much on water as the federal government spent on everything except the military and the postal service.

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

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.

We must recognize that if we try to make one neighborhood greener by stopping new building, we can easily make the world browner, by pushing new development to someplace far less environmentally friendly.

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

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.