Big cities are in their prime. In fact, their best days may be yet to come.
Throughout human history and on every inhabited continent, cities have been critical to social resilience and human flourishing. Density provided safety from outside harm and allowed networks of commerce and culture to grow. City life forced people to come into contact with others unlike them, finding common ground in new institutions and rituals of trade, government and sociability.
None of these benefits are going away anytime soon. In fact, a pandemic that just reminded us of the importance of being around one another could well enhance the value of urban areas in the eyes of Americans.
Let us count the ways big cities have always been and remain good for society.
Big cities spark innovation. In port cities and crossroads of major trade routes, global flows of people came together and new ideas came out. Philosophers and poets convened in the Athenian Agora. At one end of the Silk Road, Xi’an became an intellectual and religious center for many faiths. At the other, Venetian nobles built grand palaces and financed artists and scholars. Astronomer-priests explored the heavens atop at the pyramids of Mayan cities. The great indigenous metropolis of Cahokia built institutions of governance to command territory stretching across and beyond the Mississippi River Valley.
Big cities are resilient. Through wars, pandemics and economic disruption, cities have defied premature obituaries and often emerged stronger. Devastating epidemics were perennial features of city life in early industrial America and Europe, hitting the poorest and densest neighborhoods hardest. These crises became catalysts for the creation of modern infrastructure and new technologies to manage disease to promote human and environmental health. Cities devastated by the bombs of World War II rose again, often with help and investment from the nations that had been wartime enemies. New approaches to architecture and planning, broad social welfare programs, and advanced manufacturing processes rose from rebuilt postwar cities of Europe and Japan, growing national incomes and advancing individual economic opportunity.
Big cities are dynamic. American central business districts are an invention of the late 19th century, as new building technologies allowed skyscrapers to soar and entirely new white-collar service industries — insurance, banking — grew and diversified. Downtowns struggled as jobs and people streamed to the suburbs in the postwar era, then charged forward again as new jobs and residents returned toward the turn of the millennium.
Changing technologies of work and living have remade the urban fabric repeatedly, and will no doubt do so again, but one thing stays constant: People and jobs cluster together in place. Two years of COVID-19 disruption were a potent reminder that human beings are social animals. Digital tools enabled remote work, school and sociability. But no screen or software could substitute fully for the experience of connecting in person.
More than 40 years ago, the futurist Alvin Toffler predicted that the rise of desktop computing and networking would allow families to retreat to their “electronic cottages,” making home the center of both work and schooling. Not only did that not happen, but the companies that built those digital technologies became so invested in physical workplaces that they invested heavily in corporate headquarters and campuses where people could collaborate in person. Companies like Apple, Google and Facebook built suburban campuses that functioned like small enclosed cities, offering a range of amenities that allowed employees to eat, play and socialize at the office. Other companies returned to cities or, like Amazon, never left. Urban amenities and infrastructure helped companies recruit and retain the skilled workers who are their most valuable asset.
Yes, life in America’s big cities, especially their downtown cores, is currently upended. The rise in remote work and the growth of online everything raised questions about central cities’ continued viability. So did the pandemic-era struggles of urban school systems and big-city housing markets that spiraled into unaffordability. Pandemic closures dramatically reshuffled America’s economic geography, as work-from-home urbanites left crowded apartments in search of more space in the suburbs and beyond.
But emerging post-pandemic patterns indicate that many of these moves were temporary. New York City, San Francisco and Seattle remain extraordinarily expensive places to live. Still, workers are returning and staying, even if they no longer have five-day-a-week office commutes. Big cities offer the indispensable energy, the connection, the social glue that less dense and less diverse places cannot.
Indeed, as the disruptions of this era recede, an even greater crisis looms that make the case for cities more critical than ever. The global climate crisis was precipitated in part by low-density and car-dependent settlement in North America and beyond. That landscape did not evolve organically, but was the result of public policy decisions that funneled infrastructure investment away from cities and chose dispersion over density. The problems that big cities face now with unaffordable housing and unequal schooling result from policy choices, too. They are as surmountable as the challenges 19th-century metropolises faced in conquering the scourge of deadly diseases. They simply require the will and political imagination.
Resilient, dynamic, essential, cities are very much in their prime. This is not the end. It is just the beginning.
O’Mara is a history professor at the University of Washington and author of “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.” This is adapted from an Intelligence Squared debate on the future of big cities.
