Themes

Raw Notes

• As country’s urbanization increases by 10%, its per capita output increases by 30%
• 1950 Detroit was America’s 5th largest city
• Cities are not made by infrastructure they’re made by people
• Urban poor populations don’t demonstrate the ills of cities, but rather their strength. Cities don’t make people poor, poor people continuously move to cities to find opportunity.
• Some of Jane Jacobs theories were wrong. Limiting the height of an old building rather than building new buildings in the area doesn’t necessarily keep prices lower. Prices will still increase of demand increases and supply is restricted. Paris has extremely restrictive building laws for height. It used to be a place for starving artists, now only the rich can afford it mostly.
• 29% of all public transportation commuters in the US live in nyc and nyc has the least gas usage per capita than all US cities by a wide margin. NY state’s per capita consumption is second to last in the US
• Most Indian and Chinese people are not wealthy enough yet to live car centric urban life. The urban choices those areas make as it pertains to cars will be a major factor in our ability to fight climate change
• 1000 years ago, Europe only had 4 cities with a population of more than 50K people. One was Constantinople, and the rest were Islamic Caliphate cities - Seville, Palermo, and Cordoba
• Jevins’ paradox - efficiency improvements in a machine lead to more resource consumption, not less. Improvements in information technology leads to more demand for face to face contact. All the increased interactions are creating a more relationship intensive world
• Age of the industrial city in the west is over
• Cities sprang up along the Erie Canal after it was created - Syracuse shipped salt, Rochester became America’s flower city milling wheat from nearby farmers and sending it down the canal, Buffalo became the canal’s western terminus where goods were transferred between boats that traversed the Great Lakes and those that went down the canal. American cities like Chicago grew out of points in transport where goods needed to be shifted from one form of transport to another. Buffalo began using elevators to lift grain, which led to the development of elevators in cities.
• 1830-1900 Chicago experienced a 50x population increase.
• American cities grew up as nodes along the 19C transportation network
• Cincinnati and Chicago specialized in slaughtering and storing animals like pigs - it was cheaper to ship corn in whiskey form or in pig form and then that switch to beef when Gustavus Swift invented transit refrigeration
• Crime wave of the late 60s and 70s was really the collateral of the de industrialization of many American cities, which pushed them into decline
• A lot of NYC growth came back in the 80s from entrepreneurship in the financial industry (think Bloomberg, KKR)
• In 2008 Detroit was only 11% white
• Urban poor is not an indictment of cities. People flock the city bc it represents opportunity they didn’t otherwise have. The issue is that the urban poor are separated from the economic heart of the city. It’s the places with no poverty that we should be questioning. Why do they fail to attract the less fortunate?