Metropolis on a hill: why urban America, once written off, has come back.

• Author: Yglesias, Matthew
• Position: 'Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier' - Book review

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

by Edward Glaeser

Penguin Press HC, 352 pp.

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An observer of the American scene in 1990 might have been forgiven for thinking that cities were in terminal decline. They had been hit in the postwar years by the automobile and the exodus to the suburbs; by air conditioning and migration to the Sun Belt; by crime, drugs, and white flight. To top it all off, there was the looming revolution in information technology that stood on the verge of abolishing distance and rendering the whole concept of massing huge pools of people obsolete.

But it didn't happen. The great crime wave of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s eventually came and ebbed, and urban America started coming back. And though Sun Belt metropolises like Las Vegas, Houston, and Atlanta don't look like old-fashioned cities, they're definitely cities--crowded places with centers and peripheries--and not just random blurs of people.

The turnaround did not reach all urban centers equally. Many great American cities were founded as clusters of manufacturing enterprises, and even though U.S. industrial output is higher than ever, trade and technology means that fewer and fewer people are needed to run America's factories. The result has been continued decline for many manufacturing hubs, often to the point where upkeep of the basic urban infrastructure has become an intolerable burden and the best hope for improved quality of life is some form of planned shrinkage.

But many metropolitan areas--San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago--initially envisioned as manufacturing or transportation hubs have become thriving centers of the information economy. Meanwhile, much of the Third World has experienced explosive economic growth and massive new waves of urbanization. In a world where instant, cheap, global communication is possible, more people than ever are packing themselves into big cities.

Explaining all this is the main task of Harvard economist Edward Glaeser's new book, Triumph of the City. Organized as a series of chapters, each of which is meant to answer a single question ("What's good about slums?" "Why has sprawl spread?"), the book offers a popular treatment of Glaeser's main findings in urban economics. The result is a book that's more meandering, engaging, and entertaining than one that's trenchant and polemical, but a few key themes do emerge.

One is that...