Shlomo Angel
Subject: Why All Cities Grow Alike
Bio: Professor of City Planning at NYU and Author of Planet of Cities
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is Why All Cities Grow Alike.
Our speaker is Shlomo Angel who is a Professor of City Planning at NYU and the author of the book entitled Planet of Cities.
I want to learn why all the world’s cities look nearly identical from space, and why we should embrace sprawl and not fight it.
Shlomo can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Shlomo Angel:
I wrote Planet of Cities thinking, all cities are unique, just like you and me. We all want to be unique until we fall sick. The last thing we want is a doctor telling us that we have a unique disease. The same medical model applies to cities.
For most of human history, cities exist everywhere, but only about 10% of people lived in them. Beginning around 1800, improvements in agricultural productivity, transportation, and public health made it possible for people to move from living closer to the land to living closer to each other.
I call this transformation the urbanization project, and by the end of this century, it will only have taken about 300 years, and then it will be over. In much of the global north, the period of urban population growth has ended, while in much of the global south it is still proceeding at a good speed.
Urban expansion in the global north acquired a bad name. We call it sprawl but a rapidly growing city like Bangalore India cannot contain its expansion while tripling its population.
My definition of planning is simple: what do we have to do now to prepare for a future that we know is coming? My answer for rapidly growing cities is simple: arterial roads and no build-zones.
By no build-zones, I mean protecting lands that remain free of development, and the larger public open spaces the future city will need.
By arterial roads, I mean a spaced grid of wide roads that can carry public transport over the future expansion area. The essential task is to protect the rights of way of that grid now before development arrives. Why do it now? Because once thousands of houses have been built, acquiring these rights of way becomes enormously expensive and politically impossible.
This is what I call minimalist urban planning, as opposed to comprehensive master planning that tries to anticipate and regulate everything and ends up collecting dust on municipal walls. Minimalist planning asks, what is the minimum that government must do now that cannot easily be done later? The answer is to estimate how much land the city will need, protect places where development should not occur, and secure their arterial rights of way.
Keeping planning simple is essential because many rapidly growing cities have limited technical capacity, limited budgets, and weak powers of enforcement.
A second great difference between the global north and the global south is the informal settlement of cities. The city is being built incrementally, and planning has to work with that process rather than simply declaring it illegal.
The lesson I would like listeners to take from Planet of Cities is in rapidly growing cities, planning is about something elemental - making room for a city that does not yet exist. The opportunity to make that room exists only once, in a window that will close before the end of this century.
Larry Bernstein:
You showed in your book that density is declining almost everywhere -- not just the U.S. and Europe, but worldwide -- at about a minus 2% a year. What does that mean for a metropolitan area?
Shlomo Angel:
More research has confirmed what I initially discovered: overall densities are declining all over the world. Land consumption is increasing — density is the reciprocal of land consumption per person.
Look at the population of Lagos and Paris — Paris is three and a half times larger than Lagos. The income per capita in Paris is 10 times what it is in Lagos. Higher incomes create demand for more space. In sub-Saharan Africa, density has remained stable. In other places, like China, it’s been declining considerably, because people are so much better off than they were before.
Cities have stopped growing, densities are declining because of population decline. We’re talking about cities in Japan losing population and, as a result, declining density.
To answer your question in more numerical terms: a 2% decline in density means that in 30 years density becomes half of what it was before. If there’s a million people living in a certain city, they consume twice as much land as they did 30 years ago.
In 1800, the time of Napoleon, Paris was 11 square kilometers and housed 500,000 people. By 2014, it was 2200 square kilometers and housed 11 million people. The population Paris grew by 20 times, and the area of Paris grew by 200 times.
There’s both a population increase and a density decline, and they work together. New York City is one of the three examples that I use when I talk about urban expansion, because the commissioners that made the 1811 plan did it at the time when New York had only 90,000 people. They were all situated in the southern part of Manhattan, and they created a city seven times as large as the city that was there at the time.
Cerda when he won the competition for designing the expansion area of Barcelona, had the city grow by ten times. These people understood the future of urbanization.
We’ve lost that. New York, Barcelona or Berlin, are all 19th century examples. In the 20th century, we have exactly the opposite: Lucio Costa designing Brasília and saying this is going to be a city of 500,000 people, surrounded by a green belt. Today Brasília has 5.5 million people, and 5 million people live outside the green belt. Some people understand urban expansion and some people don’t.
Larry Bernstein:
Paul Krugman in his book Geography and Trade said that the area of a circle is so doubling the radius quadruples the land area. That’s the arithmetic behind Paris absorbing a 200-fold area increase and still being commutable -- about fourteen miles. Is that the mechanism that makes this livable?
Shlomo Angel:
Absolutely. The whole idea of urbanization is tied with the idea of compactness — people want to live as close as possible to each other and still have room to breathe. When a circle doubles in size, the average distance between locations is only a function of the radius of the circle, not of the area of the circle.
Larry Bernstein:
I didn’t expect Miami and Lagos to grow into similar shapes. How similar are the 4,000 cities that you studied?
Shlomo Angel:
In this field of studying cities, there are different communities: urban planners, urban geographers, and urban economists. The urban planners have been the ones championing uniqueness. Miami is unique. It’s got Cubans, it’s very flat, it’s at the edge of the United States.
Urban economists or urban geographers look at abstract forms and how these forms interact, and they try to see patterns. Those are the ones looking at generalities. If you’re talking to somebody who’s immersed in the details of the planning regulations in Miami, they will tell you this is extremely unique. When somebody looks at 4,000 cities, this is pretty much similar all over the place. It all depends on who you’re talking to.
Larry Bernstein:
Looking at a picture from space, the shape of Lagos, Miami, and Paris is indistinguishable. Poorer African cities are denser, but their underlying shape is basically the same. The margins have some randomness to how they expand -- but you couldn’t guess from the shape which city it was.
Shlomo Angel:
When you look at cities from space, the one thing common to all of them is they have contiguous areas of impervious surfaces. Normally, when there are no impediments and no topographical barriers, cities tend to be circular, because the circle is the geometrical locus of points that are closest to each other — not only to the center, but also to each other.
In the absence of anything else, a city will be circular. When there are intercity roads or railways, they pull out the development along the road, because the road distorts space.
Larry Bernstein:
This is a function of commute-time, not physical distance -- a fast road helps because it shrinks travel time, not miles.
Shlomo Angel:
In time, exactly — the shape reflects time rather than space. The speed on the road distorts space and makes cities more octopus-like than they would in the absence of these roads. When you have a coastline, the city develops into half a circle. Topography recognizably changes cities, because cities are built on slopes that are usually less than fifteen degrees.
Montevideo, for example, is built along the La Plata River. People like riverside views, so the city extends forever along the river. These distortions pull the cities in different directions, but the rules do not change just because of the region, or the language people speak — they are more like geometrical rules.
Larry Bernstein:
In 1996, covering emerging markets in Buenos Aires, the financial district had always been in the old downtown. The old port was redeveloped and six months later, every financial firm had moved to this brand-new center city.
Shlomo Angel:
You’re talking about Buenos Aires and Puerto Madero.
Larry Bernstein:
That shift happened almost overnight, in 1997 -- one financial district emptying into a brand-new one. What does that experience teach us?
Shlomo Angel:
It happens all the time. Traditional centers in European and Latin American cities have been dense with narrow streets and older buildings that require a lot of maintenance and, importantly, no parking. When people get better off, they leave the traditional centers and move out.
Montevideo, across the river from Buenos Aires — its traditional center completely emptied. I was offered a building there, the former British sports club, for $100,000. Nobody wanted it, because there was not enough parking. The traditional centers become tourist attractions.
We’ve seen traditional historical centers abandoned, and people move out to new areas that offer modern buildings with better infrastructure.
Larry Bernstein:
Years ago, I took my kids to the NYC tenement museum -- Jacob Riis photographed inhumane conditions there, and New York changed its laws requiring more light and better airflow. It was uneconomic at the time to alter the buildings, so these lower east side buildings abandoned their upper floors and used the lower floors for retail. In the past 15 years, the lower east side was redeveloped. Today people pay a fortune to live densely. What do you make of that?
Shlomo Angel:
Thank you for asking me this question, Larry, because I have an answer that’s slightly different from the usual story.
By the end of the eighteenth century, there are four ports in the Eastern United States that trade with Europe: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Gouverneur Morris was a real estate developer, and he’s also one of the founders — he signed the constitution. Gouverneur Morris does the 1811 Plan — he’s the commissioner. Gouverneur Morris leads this idea of we’re going to do real estate for this whole island. He also chairs the commission for the Erie Canal to connect Chicago with New York, extending the Hudson River to Lake Erie. In 1820, the Erie Canal opens and gives New York an incredible advantage over the other three ports. New York becomes the main port for business with Europe, and all the business concentrates at the southern side of Manhattan. The workers crowd around this area because they can only walk to work.
Workers are inhabiting the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and the East Village, and these three communities become extremely dense. That’s where you have the story of Jacob Riis coming up with the pictures and How the Other Half Lives.
Larry Bernstein:
Better airflow -- better air shafts?
Shlomo Angel:
When you look at the plans in the tenement museum, there are no bathrooms and kitchens — those are downstairs behind the building. The apartments are only bedrooms and workrooms. Very high density.
Jacob Riis says that there’s no way to solve this problem, and the only way is to redesign the buildings, but that’s uneconomic.
In 1897, New York acquires four other counties — the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island and expands its area enormously By 1903 there’s the first subway, and the legislation says it’s got to be a nickel fare. These people now can decentralize, because they make $2 a day, and the nickel fare means only a dime for the commuting. So, the entire community moves out.
Density lowers in a matter of twenty years; it goes down to normal. People acquire houses in Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn, and the problem goes away. Those places become generally abandoned, low quality. Then you start to have gentrification and get close to the action.
Larry Bernstein:
Manhattan’s grid is the proof of concept -- as if the commissioners had read your book a hundred years earlier. The insight is that you want that grid extended infinitely, laid down in the farmland before the suburbs arrive. Explain the magic of spacing big roads a kilometer apart, and how hard it is once the sprawl is built.
Shlomo Angel:
The grid is normally contrasted with the radials and circumference. The grid expands infinitely. Radials start out very close to each other, you move out, they get further and further away from each other. The idea of an arterial grid is that it puts you within walking distance of public transport.
Walking distance is the distance of a woman carrying bags or having a kid with her. We can do a mile grid, which is what you have in Chicago, but you can’t walk a mile to get to public transportation. A kilometer grid puts public transportation within walking distance of regular people. That’s why we’re recommending the one-kilometer grid.
Larry Bernstein:
Sometimes you get a second chance -- a catastrophe destroys everything. I asked Ed Glaeser, after the Pacific Palisades fire, what he’d change. He said: wider roads and greater density increase property values -- everyone wins. Would any of that happen?
Shlomo Angel:
The planners, the people who think that when things are leveled you get a second chance, get it wrong. In 1666, London burned down. Sir Christopher Wren, a highly esteemed architect, came to the king with a plan with arterial roads, and said, “this is our chance, let’s do that.”
And the king said that this fire was traumatic. If I start expropriating land, there’s going to be a revolution — the king refused to expropriate the land. People started to clean the debris and rebuilt London exactly along the same property lines two weeks later. What people don’t understand when they see rubble — they don’t understand it in Gaza, in Katrina, and in Ukraine that under the rubble there are property rights, and that people are not going to give up these property rights. Acquiring those property rights is just as difficult as it would be when the thing is constructed. That is why I work with Ed on the article he published on Gaza, and I said the first thing to do in Gaza is register property rights. That’s why there is never a second chance.
Larry Bernstein:
What about Tokyo? The Americans firebombed it, and it came right back.
Shlomo Angel:
What happened in Tokyo is exactly what we’re recommending in many other places that are being redeveloped, which is land pooling and readjustment. What happened in Tokyo and in Seoul, is people getting together, thirty people, but not thousands of people, pooling their land and creating a plan for that land and redividing the plots among them and leaving more land for public use, widening the roads. Tokyo was rebuilt with land pooling.
Larry Bernstein:
That’s what Ed Glaeser wanted for Pacific Palisades as well -- but didn’t get.
Shlomo Angel:
That’s right. But for this, what you need is heavy involvement on the part of the landlords themselves. I’ve been trying to do this in Malawi, and I got the tribal chiefs to agree to have people pool their lands and subdivide them. What you need is bottom-up planning, not top-down. If some planners come in and say we’re going to do these roads, no. Get out of here. But if you get the people from below to organize and say, here’s a reallocation which will increase the value of the land and put more land in public use, they agree. There must be trust, and when there is, it works. When people are distrustful of each other, when they’re distrustful of government, when they think, others are going to steal their land, it doesn’t work.
Larry Bernstein:
Take Paris, the government decided to knock down old Paris and redesign it with wide avenues. Paris was a counterexample.
Shlomo Angel:
Napoleon the Third appoints Baron Haussmann to widen this road to create a boulevard. Baron Haussmann knows that it’s going to be very difficult, so he offers very generous compensation. He says, “I’m going to give you more than what your land is worth.” He’s going to compensate them according to the new value. Moreover, Haussmann says, as I’m widening the road here, I’m going to take 30 meters on each side of the road, I’m going to expropriate that too, then I’m going to sell it back to developers to finance the road. The city council stopped him. City Council of Paris said, “no, you can only expropriate the land for the road.” He managed to build like 20 highways before they got rid of him.
Larry Bernstein:
Bangkok doesn’t follow the Shlomo rules -- no grid, so the result is chaos. Everyone can gain if we adopt the Paris approach: have the state take the land using eminent domain, increase its value, and sell it back. If it can get done in Paris, why not Bangkok?
Shlomo Angel:
Here’s the problem. With modern democracy, the only place where this can be done efficiently and effectively is China. China, you want to introduce high speed rail? All this land is state land. In two years, they built 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. The US has zero. India, the largest democracy in the world, has exactly zero.
Larry Bernstein:
Is your point that a government with real eminent domain power can achieve miracles, while one that only has it in theory, not in practice, can’t?
Shlomo Angel:
Yes. All governments have eminent domain. In practice, it hasn’t worked because it has been abused — the eminent domain was used to get the New York Times the building that it wants. So if you abuse it, you lose it.
The reapplication of eminent domain is one of the greatest challenges of modern democracies. If they don’t do this, it’s going to be at their own peril. To get high speed rail, you need to straighten the lines and acquire land.
If there was a strong government rule that says eminent domain for public use cannot be challenged — you must give up the land, you get due compensation, and goodbye. We’ve lost that, at great cost, to create efficient cities.
Larry Bernstein:
What is a power law? Tell us about George Zipf’s observation about geography.
Shlomo Angel:
George Zipf’s law says that when you rank cities by their population size, the second city is going to be half the size of the largest city population. The third city is going to be one-third the size, and so on. When you group large numbers of cities you do get a result that approximates this law.
Larry Bernstein:
At the American Revolution, the population was concentrated within a hundred miles of the coastline, in a few small towns: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. A century or two later, those are the same places with massive urban environments. Why is that?
Shlomo Angel:
I started my career — one of the first questions that I asked myself is why are settlements where they are? It turns out that there are rules about why settlements thrive in certain places and not in other places. So, for example, no settlement gets built in places that have no water. Water is the number one requirement. Then you want to be in places which are along routes, or junctions — like a port, or an intersection of two major highways. Places that are defensible. When you’re looking at these ports along the eastern seaboard, the best places for ports. Boston, Baltimore, and New York. The one city that stands out is Washington.
Larry Bernstein:
It’s the Brasília of the United States.
Shlomo Angel:
Exactly — just like Canberra, Brasília, or Chandigarh. It’s interesting that you mentioned the population being a hundred miles from the coast, because when states were looking for places for their capitals, people were complaining about all the capitals being along the coast and forced the new capitals to move inwards.
You have all these artificial places that were created, like Albany — Albany was nothing, it was just created as the state capital of New York.
What I’m saying is there’s an inertia that comes from a good location. Places along the coast are the ones that had the best ports, and there’s a huge startup cost. Cities are connected to everything else, and these connections are difficult to create and to replicate. The fact that New York was there first and created all these commercial connections with Europe made it hard for other ports to compete. Those who got there first have an advantage that is not easily taken away.
Larry Bernstein:
Rome was destroyed and took a thousand years to rebuild. Constantinople fell in 1453 and wasn’t rebuilt for a long time. Tell me about destruction with no rebirth.
Shlomo Angel:
Do I know any city today that has been abandoned or that has never been rebuilt? In the US, there used to be gold rush towns that were abandoned because the economic activity was not there anymore. But if you look at a major metropolis, I agree with you that Rome went from a million to 80,000. The same happened to Constantinople. But these are rare examples. Constantinople today is a huge metropolitan area and so is Rome.
Larry Bernstein:
South Korea’s fertility rate is 0.8 -- every generation is a sixty percent drop. What is the future of Asian cities?
Shlomo Angel:
Look at Detroit. It is abandoned — so in any block with twenty plots, there are two people living in two houses. So, then it becomes a matter of reorganizing it, let’s get rid of this block completely, make it into a park, and concentrate the people so that they live in blocks with somebody in every house on the block.
We haven’t invented yet this idea of some clean abandonment process where we say this village is abandoned, the people from that village move to the other village, and we can erase that one, turn it back into agriculture. Detroit, it is not like the whole place is abandoned. What you do get is patches of development and a lack of resources to sustain them. We don’t have a serious, organized process for moving people around. And it goes back to my earlier point of the stickiness of property rights.
Larry Bernstein:
Portland set out to manage sprawl; Houston and Las Vegas never had a plan – These three cities ex post is about the same. Your takeaway is don’t fight it, because as people get richer, they want to live less densely. Let the urban area expand, lay down arterial roads ahead of time, and accept it.
Shlomo Angel:
I want to draw your attention to a friend of mine, Alain Bertaud, who wrote a book called Order Without Design, which answers this question.
The planners think like architects — we create plans and people build according to the plans. That’s architecture. Planning is not architecture — planning just prescribes a few minimal rules and allows the market to shape cities. Planners don’t like that. They think of themselves as deciders rather than enablers.
The idea of trying to prescribe too much has always been frustrating for planners. They’re surprised that nobody follows their ideas. What do you care about whether there’s an office building here or a house here? When the time comes, somebody will want to build there, let them build there. And the same with density — you can’t tell people who build towers where the economics of towers do not justify building towers.
Planning doesn’t tell these people what to do — it can only say these are the rules and you work within these rules. If you create rules that are unworkable, then just simply ignore the rules, or make sure you vote them out of office so that they can change the rules.
The big mistakes that people make are overprescribing. Maybe in the case of Portland, Oregon, they’re managing to hold on to their urban growth boundary simply because Portland is not growing very fast. And where it grows is across the Willamette River into Washington State. So, there’s a way of escaping this urban growth boundary.
Tokyo in the 40s had a green belt. The area within the green belt was like 480 square kilometers, and Tokyo today is 6,400 square kilometers — it’s 14 times larger than the area within the green belt.
Don’t try to restrict what cities do. It’s better to let things work out and let the market decide on density. It’s a much more intelligent system than prescribing too much.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about as it relates to the future of cities?
Shlomo Angel:
I love cities, Larry. They are like fountains of creativity, new ideas on art, science and exploration. The beautiful thing is that we can live and create together. The New York metropolitan area, twenty-two million living together, interacting. And it’s peaceful.
New York is truly the first diverse city in the world. This is a city where there’s no local population — every local is from somewhere. That togetherness to work together, act together, think together and solve the problems of this planet together.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Shlomo for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, it was Cape Fear Won’t Die.
We were joined by our What Happens Next Culture Critic Darren Schwartz and my good friend Ethan Holland who has been a state prosecutor for the past 27 years.
We reviewed the new Cape Fear Apple TV series along with the two previous movies.
Please join us next week with Allison Pugh and Eddie Monroe who will be discussing AI and human connections. Allison is worried that AI will undermine our already fragile human relationships while Eddie is optimistic that AI can teach us to love.
Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Cape Fear Won’t Die, here.
