27 February 2011

Triumph of the City ~ Glaeser on Skyscrapers...

The Atlantic excerpts Harvard Professor Edward Glaeser's new book Triumph of the City in How Skyscrapers Can Save the City...
"The magic of cities comes from their people, but those people must be well served by the bricks and mortar that surround them. Cities need roads and buildings that enable people to live well and to connect easily with one another. [...] in the most desirable cities, whether they’re on the Hudson River or the Arabian Sea, height is the best way to keep prices affordable and living standards high. The success of our cities, the world’s economic engines, increasingly depends on abstruse decisions made by zoning boards and preservation committees. It certainly makes sense to control construction in dense urban spaces, but I would replace the maze of regulations now limiting new construction with three simple rules. First, cities should replace the lengthy and uncertain permitting processes now in place with a simple system of fees. [...] Second, historic preservation should be limited and well defined. [...] Finally, individual neighborhoods should have more power to protect their special character. [...] Great cities are not static -- they constantly change, and they take the world along with them. When New York and Chicago and Paris experienced great spurts of creativity and growth, they reshaped themselves to provide new structures that could house new talent and new ideas. [...] As America struggles to regain its economic footing, we would do well to remember that dense cities are also far more productive than suburbs, and offer better-paying jobs. Globalization and new technologies seem to have only made urban proximity more valuable -- young workers gain many of the skills they need in a competitive global marketplace by watching the people around them. Those tall buildings enable the human interactions that are at the heart of economic innovation, and of progress itself."

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