A major essay from Tablet Magazine, April 17:
The Rise of the Cyber City
Nature documentaries follow the annual Great Migration of roughly 2 million wildebeests from the Serengeti to the Masai Mara and back every year, and it is not hard to find footage of grimly determined wildebeests braving the waiting crocodiles who assemble in the Mara River for their regular feast. Likewise, every year the grizzly bears of Alaska wade into the rivers to feast on the returning salmon, as millions of fans watch the show on live cameras and vote in the “Fat Bear” contest for the most successful predator.
But the greatest migration on planet Earth is not in the wilderness. It is in and around the human cities of our world. Morning and evening, five to six days a week, hundreds of millions of commuters have long swarmed into and out of the world’s central business districts. The human commuters may not face crocodiles and grizzly bears on their treks, but they nevertheless provide vital nourishment for the denizens of the concrete jungles at the end of the commute. Building and maintaining the office towers in the dense urban cores toward which the swarms of migrants converge, feeding the hordes on their lunch breaks, building and operating the mass transit and road networks that ferry them to and from their homes, storing millions of cars in parking garages and lots throughout the city center and surrounding train and subway stops far out into the suburban ring: These activities employ tens of millions of people around the world and consume a significant portion of the world’s daily energy and financial expense.
In America, the Great Migration is both the creator and the defining institution of the “car city,” the dominant form of urban life. The car city, with its mix of suburban and exurban sprawl and legacy central cities, shapes patterns of wealth accumulation, income distribution, and political division across the country. Mass commuting by car across a widely dispersed urban area made America’s post-World War II middle-class society possible. But the rise of the car city was a mixed blessing. The environmental, social, and financial costs of the daily commute are responsible for many of the most acute problems our society confronts.
It isn’t just urban geography and political economy that the Great Migration has transformed. The Migration shapes the social lives of the commuters and their families so profoundly that we often aren’t aware of just how massive the consequences are. Before the Industrial Revolution, for example, most families spent the majority of their waking hours working together on tasks that were necessary to keep the family housed, clothed, and fed. Usually, the nuclear family was a small and not always very distinct element in a large pool of relatives with many generations with aunts, uncles, and cousins all part of the mix. The modern family, an isolated nuclear unit in which parents might work in very different jobs in very different parts of an urban megaplex, surrounded all day by people who their spouses rarely meet, and both the education and care of the children largely delegated to teachers and out of the home day care workers, is radically different from anything previous generations knew. It is almost certainly a factor in the weakening of institutions like marriage, the general loosening of family ties, and the rise of isolation and alienation endemic to modern life.
The Migration shapes the social lives of the commuters and their families soprofoundly that we often aren’t aware of just how massive the consequences are.After 100 years in which the rise of the car city and the gradual decline of the rail cities of the 19th and early 20th centuries shaped American culture and politics, we are seeing the beginning of a radically different form of urban life. Think of it as the cyber city. The rise of the cyber city is going to be at least as disruptive as the move from rail to car cities, and many of our social and political institutions may not survive the shift. Nevertheless, for social, economic, and environmental reasons it is something to welcome. Among other things, it promises to renew the economic machinery that made post-World War II America a paradise for the middle class and to provide Gen Z and its successors the kind of opportunity their predecessors enjoyed.
Until very recently, most people thought that the car city was the highest form of urban living and that the Great Migration would dominate our lives forever. Since the pandemic, doubts have been spreading. Work from home (WFH) opens the door to a new kind of urban living, and the shift from the car city to the cyber city looks like an upgrade. Cyber cities won’t be utopian paradises and they will have their slums and their dark alleys, but they offer more opportunity to more people at less social and environmental cost than car cities ever could.
The rewards of that upgrade are potentially so great that accelerating and facilitating the transition from the car city to the cyber city should ground the domestic policy program of any movement aiming to lead the United States in the next generation. Getting the transition right and making it quickly is not just the key to American prosperity and renewal at home. It is critical to maintaining America’s place in the world. The greater economic productivity, social cohesion, resilience, and environmental sustainability of the coming cyber city will enable a new era of American economic growth and help foster a sense of national unity and pride. Those forces in turn can underwrite a new era of American power globally, helping to maintain the peace in a rapidly developing and volatile world.
Although I think ultimately both parties will get with the program, Republicans are probably better placed to lead the transition than Democrats. This fact could, if Republicans play their cards well, make them the dominant political force for decades to come.
Especially in times like ours when rapidly cascading social and economic changes driven up the slope of the Adams curve by accelerating technological progress threaten to overwhelm us, it’s important to ground ourselves in past developments that can make the present more understandable. History matters most when the present is chaotic, and even a casual glance at the history of cities will clarify both the opportunities and the frustrations that we feel today.
Cities matter, never more than today when, unlike in past ages, a large and growing majority of people in the United States and around the world live in them. Cities, suburbs, and exurbs are where most of us grow up, build our social networks, find our spouses, educate our children, work, and accumulate our wealth. A change in the form of urban life will affect our lives in all these realms and will influence everything in politics from the distribution of votes in Congress and the Electoral College to the nature of political parties and the content of political debate.
Cities are where history is made. The word “civilization” comes to us from the Latin word for city. The Greek word for city, polis, gives us our word for politics. Since the dawn of civilization, cities have been the center of culture and politics. In Western culture, the three very different cities of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome produced what remain today the intellectual, political, spiritual, and aesthetic traditions shaping our common life. The Renaissance is unimaginable without the vibrant Italian city-states out of which it came. In modern history, great cities like Paris, London, Vienna, and Berlin left their stamp on European history and culture during the Old World’s golden age.
Cities emerge from the interplay of geography and technology. Urban living brings people together, allowing for the specialization of labor and fostering the development of new products and new skills. But bringing people into close physical contact creates a set of problems, and the shape and size of cities is determined by how these are addressed.
Almost all the great cities of antiquity, and many down to contemporary times, sprang up based on their access to waterborne transport—still today the system by which most of the world’s long-distance trade is carried out. People in cities eat more food and their industry consumes more raw materials than can be produced in their immediate neighborhood. Iron for the blacksmiths, brick and marble for the builders, yarn for the spinners, and a thousand other goods must be brought to and then exported from the city.
Food is the worst of it. Even small cities require, literally, tons of food....
....MUCH MORE
Metropolitans forget the reality of that sentence at their peril.
