American Dream

washingtonpost.com

City Of the Future

Unless it keeps its citizens safe, the modern metropolis may go the way of ancient Rome

By Joel Kotkin
Sunday, July 24, 2005; B01

Quotes (from the article):

You've got to hand it to those Londoners. They refused to be cowed by the July 7 terrorist attacks. And when new explosions in the underground last week threatened to paralyze the city again, they carried on with characteristic British stiff upper lipness. But admirable as their urbanite resilience has been, it shouldn't blind us to the reality that the bombings in the British capital underscored: that the great challenge facing the world's major cities today is finding a way to make life safe for their citizens.

Though current fashion is to blame causes such as energy, food and water shortages for urban decline through the centuries, the truth is that far more cities have fallen due to a breakdown in security. Whether the menace is internal disorder or external threat, history has shown repeatedly that once a city can no longer protect its inhabitants, they inevitably flee, and the city slides into decline and even extinction.

While modern cities are a long way from extinction, it's only by acknowledging the primacy of security -- and addressing it in the most aggressive manner -- that they will be able to survive
and thrive in this new century, in which they already face the challenge of a telecommunications revolution that is undermining their traditional monopoly on information and culture, and draining their populations.

As businesses and industries escape the urban core to operate in small towns and even the countryside, demographic surveys show that the population is going with them. After a brief, welcome surge in inner-city populations in the late 1990s, most older American cities have lost more people than they gained since 2000. Families, retirees and immigrants, all the key sources of new population growth, are largely deserting the urban core. This is true not only for perennial losers such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Detroit, but also places that enjoyed a brief resurgence in the last decade, like San Francisco, Minneapolis and Chicago.

Nor is this flight a mere American phenomenon: Inner-city population has been dropping in London, Paris, Hamburg, Milan and Frankfurt. In many of these cities, the only rapidly growing group is immigrants, most of them Muslim, including many who are increasingly targeted by and susceptible to Islamist extremism.

Note: WashingtonPost.com had a follow-up online chat with Joel Kotkin on Monday, 25 July 2005 - it can be viewed here.