Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
Toronto is number one. Los Angeles is number two. And New York sits just behind Winnipeg and Calgary. Huh?
The reason this is likely surprising to you is that when most people think of urban density they think of the urban core. And you are correct in thinking that the urban core of New York City is denser than the urban core of Winnipeg.
The difference here is that we are talking about “urban area” (or “population centre” in Canada). This is the continuously built up area around each major city. Think of it as the lit up area that you might see on a nighttime aerial photo.
Urban areas don’t care about municipal or other jurisdictional boundaries. And they don’t factor rural areas. Urban areas are a measure of continuous urbanization.
So even if you have the densest downtown on the planet, if you have a sprawling low-density urban area surrounding it, you can still end up with a relatively low overall population density. And this is precisely what is happening here with New York.
This is also why there’s only so much that you can glean from a blended average like this. Because you can have very different urban forms and very different mobility splits (think New York City vs. Winnipeg), and still end up with somewhat comparable averages.
We talk a lot on this blog about how best to intensify and add housing to our existing cities. But here’s alternative approach: Why not just built entirely new cities? This way you don’t have to worry about fixing any of the things that are currently broken in our existing cities or worry about messy things like community engagement.
Now, I disagree with many, or perhaps most, of the points that Nathan J. Robinson puts forward in the above Current Affairs article, but I think this is an interesting question to unpack. Robinson’s argument is that the main obstacle for building new cities in the US is ideological rather than technological. You need a bit more central government planning if you’re going to pull off a completely new urban center. And that’s not how things are generally done in the US.
However, I think the real problem is that cities have powerful network effects that encourage centralization (even if some people are working from home). It’s easy to look at a large country like Canada and say to yourself, “but look at all that empty land. How could we possibly have a housing shortage?” The reality is that most of our land is empty and cheap because it has little value. The jobs are in our cities and that’s why Canada is a largely urban country.
Indeed, this is how most cities have emerged historically. They start with some sort of economic purpose, be it an important trade route, access to resources, or some other driver of prosperity. It is for this reason that urbanists like Alain Bertaud will tell you that, typically, urban infrastructure follows the market, and not the other way around. Because who wants to live in a city with nice infrastructure but no jobs? More importantly, how long can a city without a strong economic purpose even last?
Take for example Delhi. By 2030, Delhi is expected to be the largest city in the world. This has made it exceedingly difficult for the city to build enough new housing. So government there has been focusing on building new cities on the outskirts surrounding Delhi. These cities are referred to as “counter magnets”, and their purpose is to intercept and literally attract new migrants before they reach Delhi, thereby relieving some of the urban pressures on the capital.
The fact that these cities are referred to as “counter magnets” speaks to exactly my point about centralization. It is recognition that Delhi is by far the biggest urban magnet. Because of this, these satellite cities haven’t been as successful as everyone had initially hoped. Migrants seem to still want Delhi. You can build new housing, but without jobs and economic opportunity, people will continue to flock to the biggest urban magnets.
So sooner or later, you’ll need to fix what isn’t working.
In this recent post by Naval Ravikant, he argues that innovation seems to like two things: decentralization and a frontier. He starts by giving the examples of more decentralized states (i.e. smaller federal governments) and the Wild West. The American frontier was, as you know, wild. But it was also a place of great innovation.
Naval then goes on to talk about the pendulum that tends to swing between centralization and decentralization. And in the world of technology, the last decade has been one of centralization (big companies). But this pendulum is much broader. Cities, as we have talked about before on this blog, are constantly in tension between centralizing and decentralizing forces.
COVID was a powerful decentralizing force for cities. Everything was closed and we were all supposed to stay home. And so most/all of the benefits of centralizing in a city were suddenly, yet temporarily, turned off. Many people naturally decentralized. But when the dust finally settles, I highly doubt it will be as dramatic as most people initially thought.
So how do we reconcile this with Naval’s argument that new frontiers and decentralization are actually what are needed for innovation? I agree wholeheartedly that one of the key innovations with crypto, for example, is that it is decentralized and permissionless. But what does this ultimately mean for cities and our built form?
Does it encourage a similar sort of decentralization to happen? Or is the irony that decentralized technologies actually still thrive in centralized urban places? We may all be online buying NFTs, but we still want to get together in person to show them off and exchange ideas.
Eric Jaffe, of Sidewalk Labs, recently wrote about an interesting research paper — from the Journal of the American Planning Association — that looked at the developer response to an inclusionary zoning policy change in London. The full research paper can be found over here.
The change was an expansion to existing mandatory IZ policies. Between 2005 and 2008, each of the 33 local authorities in Greater London reduced the minimum threshold for new housing projects. Previously it only applied to new developments with 15 or more units, but it was reduced to projects with 10 or more units. In other words, projects with a total of 10-14 units were now subject to IZ, whereas they were previously exempt.
These feel like small unit counts, but I guess it speaks to the scale of development happening in London. You generally need pretty high prices to make these kinds of boutique projects pencil out. By comparison, the IZ threshold here in Toronto is expected to be 100 or more units.
In any event, here’s what happened in London:
Before the policy change developers were effectively building up to the 14 unit mark (to avoid IZ). Following that new supply dropped off. After the change, developers simply adjusted their project sizes and built more projects with less than 10 units.
Interestingly enough, the researchers found that there was generally no net loss of new homes during the study period (2004 to 2014); developers simply built more projects with lower unit counts. But more importantly, the team discovered that the policy change only kind of worked.
The increase in affordable housing was modest. The researchers uncovered a net increase of two affordable units per borough, per year, among projects within the 10-14 unit band. That’s something. But London is a big place.
Of course, this is a response to a particular kind of policy change in a particular kind of market. Development is a local business and it’s oftentimes hard to generalize. But it does speak to the fact that there are nuances, complexities, and market distortions to consider when it comes to land use policies.
I have come to the realization that I don’t get nearly enough emails throughout the day (sarcasm), and so I’ve just subscribed to Overview’s daily post.
Overview is a company that uses satellite and aerial imagery to show how humans and natural forces are shaping the earth. In addition to a daily post, their work includes stories, books, prints, and various other projects and collaborations. It’s pretty cool stuff.
One example of a partnership is this one here with ArchDaily, where they look at urban block patterns around the world. Everywhere from Barcelona to Belo Horizonte. I think many of you will enjoy flipping through these aerials.
And if you’re interested in this topic (you know, urban morphology), you may also enjoy this book by Ildefons Cerdà called, The General Theory of Urbanization 1867. Cerdà, and his work, were instrumental in shaping Barcelona at a time when the word “urbanization” didn’t even really exist.
This morning I stumbled up on this conversation between Richard Florida and Ed Glaeser about the post-pandemic city. It’s from September 2020 and that is obvious in some of the comments. Richard Florida (who was in Toronto) remarked that it felt like the pandemic was mostly over at that time and that Canada had seemingly done a much better job than the US at tackling it. That no longer feels right. But I did find myself agreeing with some of their other points.
Here’s one from Ed Glaeser that looks back to previous health crises:
But pretty much since the 14th century, urbanization proceeded despite the reappearance of the Black Death in the 1350s. Urbanization proceeded despite the Great Plague of London in the 1660s. All of the great diseases that spread in 19th-century America, cholera, yellow fever, the urbanization just chugged along. Even the influenza pandemic of 1919-1920 was followed by a tremendous decade of city building. So, I think our cities have proven to be remarkably resilient.
Harvard economist Ed Glaeser and former New York City Health Commissioner Mary Bassett were recently interviewed on national radio about COVID-19 and the future of our cities. What both of them touch on is the long history that cities and pandemics have had together, which is something that Glaeser also wrote about over here in City Journal. This pandemic isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.
Using history as an example, Glaeser makes the argument all of this can go one of two ways. After the influenza epidemic of 1919, cities rebounded quickly. The roaring twenties were one of “the great city-building decades in American history.” But on the other hand, there’s the Justinian Plague (circa 541 to 750 CE), which is thought to have played an important role in the fall of the Roman Empire. Glaeser argues that this plague, which took over 200 years to extinguish, is responsible for 800 years of de-urbanization across the Mediterranean. Is that so?
A quick search reveals that the impacts of the Justinian Plague are, of course, greatly contested. Some scholars have questioned whether it was actually an “inconsequential pandemic.” Whatever the case may be, it doesn’t change the fact that the modern world has been built around density and proximity. We are social beings and we are smarter and more productive when we are able to cluster together. That was the case in 750 CE and it remains the case today.
Cities all around the world continue to create wealth and lift people out of poverty. But they also repulse people through traffic congestion, housing supply shortages, and overcrowding (which is distinct from density). Generally though, the forces of attraction have tended to outweigh the forces of repulsion, which is why the world continues to urbanize.
As Azeem points out, the first city believed to have reached 1 million inhabitants was Rome. It happened some 2,000 years ago. In the 1930s, New York then became the first city to reach 10 million inhabitants. And today, the 10 largest urban agglomerations in the world look something like this:
Outside of Japan, all of these city regions are expected to add many more people by 2030. Missing from this chart, however, are cities such as Lagos, Nigeria. Between 2018 and 2050, the UN estimates that 35% of the growth in the world’s urban population will come from just three countries: India (+416 million), China (+255 million), and Nigeria (+189 million).
Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has a new paper out talking about “urbanization and its discontents.” In it, he argues that while cities today are working remarkably well for highly skilled people, they don’t seem to be delivering the same upward mobility to lower skilled people. The “urban wage premium” for this segment of the population has seemingly disappeared.
The posited causes of this discontent will likely resonate with many of you:
Urban resurgence represents private sector success, and the public sector typically only catches up to urban change with a considerable lag. Moreover, as urban machines have been replaced by governments that are more accountable to empowered residents, urban governments do more to protect insiders and less to enable growth. The power of insiders can be seen in the regulatory limits on new construction and new businesses, the slow pace of school reform and the unwillingness to embrace congestion pricing.
Unfortunately, this paper isn’t available for free online. If you’re interested, you’ll need to purchase a copy, here.
This UN report (2018) on urbanization trends is a fascinating way to understand how our world is growing and changing. So today’s post is about some of my takeaways. If you have others, feel free to add them to the comment section below.
But first, some definitions.
The UN report considers 3 ways to measure the size of a city, all of which we have used before on this blog. The first is the “city proper.” That is the current administrative boundary of a city. The second is the “urban agglomeration” area, which is a city’s contiguous built-up area. And the third is the “metropolitan area,” which is the approximate area of economic and social interconnectedness.
Above is what these 3 boundaries might look like for Toronto (which is the example they use in their report). About the only one that isn’t debatable is the “city proper” boundary; but it really doesn’t capture the full extent of a city. Wherever possible, the UN report relies on the city’s urban agglomeration area. They also define a “megacity” as a city of over 10 million people.
The largest city in the world is currently Tokyo. However, from 2018 to 2030 it is expected to decline by almost 900,000 people. Whereas, the city in 2nd position — Delhi — is expected to add more than 10 million inhabitants during this same time period. By 2030, these are expected to be the largest cities in the world:
Most current megacities are located in what the UN refers to as the “Global South.” And 9 out of the 10 cities projected to become megacities by 2030 are located in developing countries. The one exception is London. Though all regions in the world are becoming more urban, the real population growth is happening in Asia and Africa.
Most cities — 59% of cities with 500,000 or more people — are at risk of at least one natural disaster. And 3 megacities — namely Manila, Osaka, and Tokyo — are high risk for 3 or more types of natural disaster.
Going through the report’s data charts, it’s also interesting to note that Toronto is not projected to become a megacity by 2030. However, the Toronto area already represents over 20% of Canada’s entire urban population.
In the United States, Chicago’s urban agglomeration is projected to continuing growing and does come close to megacity status by 2030. The Miami region is similarly expected to grow and is actually right on top of Toronto in terms of population. But the fastest growing regions are, of course, expected to be the city’s that can more easily sprawl (Las Vegas, Phoenix, and so on).
Bogotá, Colombia is already a megacity and is expected to add almost 2 million people by 2030. It currently represents about 26.5% of the country’s entire urban population. São Paulo remains one of the top 10 largest cities in the world and is similarly projected to add over 2 million people in the same time period, but to a much larger base.
In Europe, it’s London, Paris, and Moscow, with the latter two already in possession of megacity status.
Now quantity isn’t everything. Despite not ranking in the top 10 in terms of population, both New York and London are widely considered to be the world’s preeminent global cities. At the same time, we do know that the size of a city does create certain socioeconomic benefits. Urban agglomerations create agglomeration economies.
If you’d like to download a copy of the World’s Cities in 2018 (United Nations), click here.
