Age of the City, by University of Oxford’s Ian Goldin and The Economist’s Tom Lee-Devlin, explores the global forces shaping cities, what the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed about them, and the stark challenges they face, including climate change. It takes a global perspective, considering not only the successes and challenges of cities in the rich world, from New York to Tokyo, but also the explosive growth of cities in the poor world, from Lagos to Dhaka.
Goldin and Lee-Devlin describe how different forces are shaping cities in the rich and majority world. In the rich world, the authors highlight agglomeration and polarisation as twin forces that have created the increase in wealth for some, and the unaffordability of city living for others, which has become the reality of many city dwellers’ lives. The situation is very different for cities in the majority world. Here, urbanisation, which took centuries in the West, is being accelerated further in many places by endemic poverty, civil wars, and increasingly frequent climate disasters.
Over the last 40 years, through the process of agglomeration, economic activity has become increasingly concentrated in a relatively small number of global hubs, creating so-called “superstar” cities, such as San Francisco, New York, London, Paris and Shanghai. These cities have become the places of choice for global corporations in sectors such as digital technology, banking and finance, and pharmaceuticals. As a result, they have captured the lion’s share of economic growth, and created a dramatic divergence between them, and so-called “left behind cities”. The anger and despair of those living in left-behind places have been a major contributor, of course, to the rise of populist movements from Trump to Brexit.
Agglomeration has been accompanied by a second force, namely polarisation. Multinational corporations in superstar cities employ highly paid “knowledge workers” and support an ecosystem of similarly highly paid white-collar professionals such as lawyers, marketers, management consultants and executives. Cities, of course, also require workers in non-corporate sectors, including retail, hospitality, construction, education, and healthcare. In recent decades, polarisation has soared as wages for those working for corporations have surged, while pay for non-corporate workers has languished. As a result, many city dwellers are now experiencing chronic unaffordability of housing and rent, a problem exacerbated to crisis levels by failures in housing policy and the rapidly rising cost of living.
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A different dynamic is unfolding in the majority world. Due to rapid urbanisation, cities in developing countries today account for most of the world’s urban-dwelling population. Most poor countries, however, have been urbanising much faster than their economies have been growing. This urbanisation in the absence of development has resulted in mass slums, endemic poverty and appalling living conditions for many. The forces fuelling the growth of cities in the poor world are not agglomeration around multinational corporations, but rather flight from poverty and hunger in the countryside, and, in many places, displacement from civil wars. Climate change is magnifying this rural exodus to crisis levels across the developing world.
The analysis in Age of the City is informative and insightful, but it omits many of the deeper structural drivers behind the alarming problems that cities now face. In the rich world, these structural drivers include the financialisation of the global economy and the unwarranted financial rewards that workers in that sector enjoy, the monopoly status and consequent wealth and power of global corporations, and the commodification of housing and the generational divide in wealth and aspirations that that has wrought. All of these factors lie outside the remit of city managers, and even national authorities, but they are each impacting severely on our lived experiences. So too in the developing world, where city authorities have little control over endemic poverty, civil wars, and climate change.
The book is somewhat dated too in its use of terms such as “high skilled knowledge workers” versus “low skilled service workers”. The pandemic has shown that many so-called low-skilled workers are essential to society in ways that highly paid knowledge workers are simply not. Admittedly, the terms “highly rewarded monetarily but non-essential for society” and “inadequately rewarded financially but essential for society” are clunky, but they better reflect the lessons we learned during the pandemic.
The book’s thesis that the city is where the battles of inequality, social division, pandemics, and climate change must be faced belies the reality that reforming our cities may not be possible without deep global structural reforms. Reinventing our cities as places of equality and centres of care, learning, creativity, and human flourishing will require a focus on society, not just the economy, and an inversion of values that the authors do not consider. Age of the City is worth reading but read it as a primer for the difficult but necessary work of reimagining our cities, and our world, as much better places than they have become.
- Ian Hughes is a Senior Research Fellow at the MaREI Centre, Environmental Research Institute at University College Cork.
