The rise, fall and rise of the city

Cities are in trouble. A pandemic is making us question urban density, and riots have littered the streets with burned out cars and broken glass. People and businesses will leave and never return.

But these aren’t the real reasons that cities are in trouble. They’ve recovered from much worse in the past, including plagues and war. They always recovered because a city isn’t a choice, it’s a necessity. A city is where we must organize our labor and knowledge to produce the wealth that fuels our progress.

It's been like this since the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. And now it will end with the digital economy.

Look around.

America’s biggest cities - New York, Los Angeles and Chicago - are losing people. So are Paris and London. Tokyo has peaked and even China is seeing 1 in 3 of its cities start to shrink.

They survived war, crime, high costs and mind-numbing commutes. But they can’t survive the rise of technology that will transfer millions of jobs into the suburbs and smaller towns.

While the Internet, 5G and teleconferencing have been around for a while, it was the pandemic that really shattered the myth that we need to be present to be productive. So a trickle becomes a flood as Twitter, Facebook, Box, Nationwide Insurance and many others wake up to the realization that they don’t need the city.

“The genie is out of the bottle,” says Kate Lister, head of Global Workplace Analytics. “Our best estimate is that 25-30% of the workforce will be working from home multiple days a week by the end of 2021.”

This is just the beginning. Half the people living in cities want to move away. And now they can.

This choice has been a long time coming.

History of cities

Cities emerged because the factories of the Industrial Revolution needed human labor. They needed our muscles and bones - our physical energy – to move their machines and synchronize with the labor of others, in one place. In a factory, in a city.

It happened quickly. Up to 1800, only 3% of people lived in cities. Then boom.

Even as the economy matured and our work moved on from spinning cotton and assembling Model T Fords, we still had to show up in person, using our muscles and bones to shuffle paperwork, manage the store and attend meetings.

Till now.

Cities are history

Cumberland is an old mining town carved out of the mountains that form the backbone of Vancouver Island. In the late 1800s it was one of the most productive coal faces in Canada, attracting workers from far afield as China and Japan.

As the coal market died, so did Cumberland. People left and the traditional storefronts so typical of a western mining town were emptied out and boarded up. Cumberland was a mostly forgotten footnote in history books until a distant flicker of change in places like Silicon Valley and Boston triggered a wave of new technology that sent a ripple of life through this small town and so many others.

The Internet, Wifi and other trappings of the digital economy started liberating people from offices in the city so they could be closer to what they love. In Cumberland, this means 80 kilometers of mountain bike trails just 25 minutes away from skiing in one direction and the beach in the other.

Now this friendly town with a flourishing tech scene, a microbrewery on one street corner and an organic food market on the other, is growing so quickly that it’s population will double in ten years.

This is happening across North America as once obscure towns like Frisco, Buckeye and New Braunfels become America’s fastest-growing large cities (defined as a population of 50,000 or more).

Jobs created our cities. When the jobs leave, the cities will die.

Unless they change.

A future for cities?

Most people have a natural aversion to cities. We are social but we like to keep our social groups small. Studies show that we can enjoy stable, meaningful relationships with up to around 150 people. This is called Dunbar’s Number. Go any higher and the social bonds start to break down and we need coercion to enforce unity.

Large cities sit at the extreme end of this spectrum of social bonding, where our ties with each other become frayed, disconnected and even dangerous. This then triggers the need for CCTV, fines, countless laws and regulations, as well as the restrictions we place on ourselves like alarms, locked doors, avoiding eye contact and not talking to strangers.

The conflict between social unity and urban density has been largely solved in Japan, where a complex culture of behavior and counter-behavior creates unity, but at the expense of individuality.

It also works in Japan because there’s almost complete homogeneity in race, language and culture. It won’t work almost everywhere else.

So how can cities overcome the social distrust that keeps pushing people away, when they no longer supply enough jobs to keep pulling people in?

The good news is that many of us still like cities, especially younger people who are seeking new social connections like romantic relationships and their first jobs.

Cities also remain rich environments for innovation. As Matt Ridley so colorfully puts it, just as people meet and mate to produce new people, ideas need to meet and mate to produce new ideas. Cities still have the highest concentration of people and their ideas.

For large cities to have a future in a time when they provide fewer jobs, they have to pivot to these strengths, while seriously tackling all the other ‘push’ factors that drive people away like awful commutes, lousy infrastructure, blight and crime.

Fortunately, there are some cities that are showing the way.

Singapore

Singapore had a difficult history. It suffered a brutal occupation during WWII before getting kicked out of confederation with Malaysia. In the 1960s it was left a small island without resources, surrounded by much larger and often hostile neighbors.Many lived in slums without running water. Malaria and tuberculosis were rife, and dozens of people were being killed in race riots that rippled through the new country.

And today? This small island just 30 kilometers across and a short hop from the equator is often ranked the world’s best for living, working, beauty and food. While global peers like New York, Sydney, Paris, and London struggle to retain higher-income residents, so many professionals want to move to Singapore that it keeps hiking the required salary for prospective immigrants.

A young, foreign professional needs to earn at least S$3900 a month to get an employment pass. That’s just for fresh grads and people with little experience. A foreign professional in their 40s needs to earn about S$100,000 a year for the privilege of working in Singapore.

So what is Singapore doing right to attract people that so many other cities are doing wrong?

They have a plan

Singapore plans ahead, far ahead.

The proof is evident the moment you land at the airport and take a taxi to the new downtown business district. Both places used to lie under the sea.

Decades ago, the city’s planners realized that as the population grew, the city would have to as well. They meant that literally, with an aggressive land reclamation program that included bulldozing some of the island’s hills into the sea in order to gain another 130 square kilometers of land.

A country that’s already grown 24% will add another 8% by 2030.

Unlike so many other cities that become overwhelmed by population density, Singapore realizes that the well-being of a city and its people means adopting some of the characteristics of the suburbs or towns that most of us prefer.

And they’re going to extraordinary lengths to ensure this happens.

Recovering a river

In its early days of development, Singapore diverted many natural rivers and streams into concrete channels which were then surrounded by yet more concrete sidewalks and buildings.

It was the fate of the Kallang River, whose meandering course to the sea from its headwaters in the forested heart of the island was turned into the large ditch in the image below.

Now look at it today.

Three kilometers of river have been returned to its natural state, providing a welcome escape for both people and wildlife, including a family of smooth-coated otters, a critically endangered species that has returned to a greener Singapore after a 30 year absence.

The Kallang River is just one example of the effort to make the city less like a city.

One million trees are being planted, more rivers are being freed from their concrete prisons, eco bridges are linking forests, and gardens are growing skyward.

The results are incredible. Along with the return of otters, the city is seeing wildlife that have been missing for decades.

Wild boar feed along the roads, crocodiles have moved into coastal mangroves, sea turtles are scraping out nests on local beaches, and the once-extirpated sambar deer has started breeding in the large forested center of the city.

(The deer reappeared after a small group escaped from the zoo when a falling tree broke the fence around their enclosure. Nature always finds a way.)

Removing the roads

To reduce the oppressive gray density that blights so many cities, Singapore has also been clever about hiding infrastructure. To service the new downtown business district, they built the world’s biggest underground cooling plant.

In the west of the city, they hollowed out the Jurong caverns, a massive underground storage facility for oil. Buried more than 100 meters below ground, the 8 kilometers of caverns and tunnels frees up land totalling 84 football fields.

In perhaps the clearest example of how Singapore is becoming less like a city and more like the smaller towns and suburbs where we tell pollsters we want to live, there are its plans for Orchard Road, the city’s shopping district.

Instead of squeezing more shops and offices into one of the world’s most expensive streets, they are taking some of the street away. One end of Orchard Road will be removed and turned into a large park while the rest of the road will be enhanced with native trees as part of plans to create a 6 kilometer green corridor through the most congested part of the city.

Singapore is perhaps the best example of this trend to deurbanization, but it’s not alone.

Seoul famously restored the once-buried Cheonggyecheon River to create a 5 kilometer long park through the city. This unearthing of buried rivers, called daylighting, is catching on with cities like New York, Auckland and Sheffield all ripping up concrete to reveal long-lost streams.

In Paris they are reforesting urban areas with the goal of having 50% of the city’s surface covered in greenery, while desert cities like Dubai are planting tens of thousands of trees to hold back the sands.

Researchers at MIT have been busy tracking this global movement to re-green our cities. Realizing that it’s not enough to isolate trees in parks while the rest of the city remains a dreary mosaic of concrete and metal, they came up with Treepedia, a fascinating use of Google street view that reveals where pedestrians can look up from the street and see a tree.

While re-greening our cities will make people happier and reduce the pressure to move elsewhere to work, it’s no panacea. Cities need to seriously assess other factors that cause people to move away including crime, taxation, weak governance and self-destructive politics that fuel so much division when we really have so much in common.

But it’s a start. Cities are facing an existential threat as the digital economy gives rise to remote work. Many have already left. Half of those remaining want to leave, and will.

City planners need to look beyond short-sighted political victories. Singapore has shown what is possible.

Will it happen? I’m doubtful. But you can always hope.

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