The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (2 page)

ALSO BY JOEL KOTKIN

California, Inc. (with Paul Grabowicz)
The Valley
The Third Century (with Yoriko Kishimoto)
Tribes
The New Geography

TO MY BROTHER, MARK

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The writing of this book has been something like the intellectual equivalent of trench warfare. The scope has been so wide, and the need for information so pressing, that I have often felt overwhelmed by the work ahead and perturbed by the seemingly torturous pace of progress.

Such a grueling, albeit highly satisfying, experience would have been intolerable without the help and indulgence of many individuals. I first want to thank my agent, Melanie Jackson, and my publicist, Jackie Green, for their unwavering support. I also owe a great debt to my editors at Random House, first Scott Moyers and later Will Murphy, for their great editing and direction.

Editors at various newspapers and magazines have helped hone this effort. I am particularly grateful to editors of long acquaintance, especially Gary Spiecker at the
Los Angeles Times
and Steve Luxemburg and Zofia Smardz at
The Washington Post.
I also owe thanks to
The New York
Times
’s Patrick J. Lyons; Barbara Phillips and Max Boot at
The Wall Street
Journal;
and Ed Sussman at
Inc.
I would also like to express my special appreciation to Karl Zinsmeister at the
American Enterprise
for many wonderful opportunities, great conversations, and constant ecouragement.

I owe much to those who contributed most directly to this effort, my research assistants from the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, where I was a senior fellow until the summer of 2004. These include Heather Barbour, Joseph “Joe” Hummer, Mingjie “Carol” Li, Cynthia Guerrero, and Sarah Priestnall, all of whom contributed significantly to this effort.

I am especially indebted to two assistants who, after graduation, continued to aid this effort. Erika Ozuna, now resident back home in McAllen, Texas, helped not only with general research, but mostly with that concerning her native Mexico. Reverend Karen Speicher not only did prodigious research, but also influenced the content, particularly in terms of the central role of religion. I also would like to extend my thanks to key Pepperdine personnel, especially former university president David Davenport, Sheryl Kelo, Brad Cheves, Britt Daino, Marie-Ann Thaler, and James Wilburn, as well as my colleague Michael Shires.

The research on cities also benefited from the support of the Milken Institute, notably Ross DeVol and Suzanne Trimbath, and most especially Perry Wong, who was kind enough to help me with the sections on Chinese history. I also feel a debt of gratitude to Ali Modarres, a professor at California State University at Los Angeles and an expert on Islamic cities. David Friedman, my good friend and intellectual partner, assisted with thinking on the book, most particularly in the sections dealing with Japan. In addition, I want to thank my colleague at the New America Foundation, Gregory Rodriguez, who offered his friendship as well as his understanding of Los Angeles and the impact of immigration. I should like to express my gratitude to Robert Carr, who cheerfully maintained and designed the electronic network without which this book could not have been written.

My understanding of Los Angeles was further enhanced by work I have conducted for the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley with the assistance of Robert Scott, David Fleming, and Bruce Ackerman. In addition, I have been fortunate to work on projects with the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, particularly with Matt Toledo, Lee Harrington, and Jack Kyser. In the Inland Empire, I appreciate the opportunity to work with the La Jolla Institute and the Inland Empire Economic Partnership, in particular Steve PonTell and Terri Ooms. I have also learned a great deal about California and cities in general from Kevin Starr, now at the University of Southern California.

My understanding of other contemporary American cities was greatly assisted by my work in various locations. In many of these places, I have been assisted by my friend William Frey, a demographer working at the Brookings Institution and at the University of Michigan. John Kasarda at the Kenan Institute at the University of North Carolina also provided encouragement and timely comments as the manuscript was being prepared.

Speaking and work as a consultant has given me invaluable hands-on experience on the functioning of cities. I have been fortunate to learn much about the middle of America through my association with the Regional Chamber and Commerce Association of St. Louis, particularly in the persons of Dick Fleming, Robert Coy, and Debbie Frederick. Andrew Segal, David Wolff, and Mayor Bob Lanier of Houston also helped me to understand and appreciate the dynamics of that growing, vital Texas metropolis. My work with Delore Zimmerman, principal at CEO Praxis, has given me excellent insight into the dynamics of small cities in the Great Plains, while that with Leslie Parks has been invaluable in places such as San Jose and Portland, Oregon.

In New York, I have been fortunate to be a fellow at the Newman Institute at Baruch College, City University of New York, and to have many conversations with Henry Wollman, a prominent developer and director of the institute. Also in New York, I would like to extend my gratitude to the Center for an Urban Future, including Neil Kleiman, Jonathan Bowles, Kim Nauer, and Noemi Altman, colleagues on the center’s 2004 study on the future of America’s premier metropolis.

I was also helped in Europe, most particularly by Eduard Bomhoff and the city of Rotterdam, which sponsored a visit there to see and learn about that great port city. Geert Mak and Paul Brink in Amsterdam were essential guides to the essential precursor of the modern commercial metropolis. I further appreciate the assistance in understanding Montreal by my uncle (by marriage) Léon Graub and by numerous people in Paris, including my French in-laws.

In terms of Asia, I will always owe a debt to my Japanese sensei, the late Jiro Tokuyama, whose insights live with me even if he has gone into another realm. My friend Vincent Diau has been a constant source of information about new developments in China.

Perhaps no one was a greater aid in putting this book together than my friend and occasional coauthor Fred Siegel, professor of Urban History at Cooper Union in New York. Fred’s knowledge of urban history, particularly in Europe and the United States, informed many of my reading decisions and, at times, challenged ideas that needed to be challenged.

It is to my family, who had to endure my endless complaining and occasional desk-pounding fits, that I owe the greatest debt. This includes my brother, Mark, to whom this book is dedicated, my sister-in-law, Pamela Putnam, and my remarkable mother, Loretta Kotkin. And most particularly to my greatest continuing inspiration, my beloved and ever patient wife, Mandy, my cherished daughters, the ever curious Ariel Shelley and the new addition to our California household, little Hannah Elisabeth. We expect to hear much more from those two young urbanites in the future.

PREFACE

The evolution of cities embodies the story of humanity as it rose from primitive origins to impose itself on the world. It also represents, as the French theologian Jacques Ellul once noted, man’s fall from natural grace and the subsequent attempt to create a new, workable order.

“Cain has built a city,” Ellul wrote. “For God’s Eden he substitutes his own.”
¹
This striving to create a new kind of man-made environment occupied the original city builders from Mesoamerica to China, North Africa, India, and Mesopotamia. In the process, they forged a social and moral order transcending the old tribal and clan relationships that previously had shaped human relationships.

Two central themes have informed this history of cities. First is the universality of the urban experience, despite vast differences in race, climate, and location. This was true even before instant communication, global networks, and ease of transportation made the commonality among cities ever more obvious. As the French historian Fernand Braudel once noted, “A town is always a town, wherever it is located, in time as well as space.”
²

The sixteenth-century diary of Bernal Díaz, with which this book begins, reveals this in startling ways. A soldier with Cortés, Díaz encountered a totally alien urbanity—the great city of Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City—that still exhibited characteristics found in European cities such as Seville, Antwerp, or Constantinople.

Like a European metropolis, Tenochtitlán was anchored by a great religious center, a sacred space. It lay in a well-defended, secure location that allowed for an intense city life. The great Aztec capital also boasted large marketplaces that, while offering many strange and exotic goods, still functioned in much the same way as their counterparts in cities across the Atlantic.

These commonalities can be seen in cities across the world today. Police forces, commercial centers, and religious establishments in East Asia or East Anglia or the vast suburbs of Los Angeles often operate in similar ways, occupy the same critical places in the metropolis, and even share common architectural forms. Then there is the visceral “feel” of the city almost everywhere—the same quickening of pace on a busy street, an informal marketplace, or a freeway interchange, the need to create notable places, the sharing of a unique civic identity.

Many urban historians have identified this phenomenon with a particular kind of city—the densely settled, central urban area epitomized by New York, Chicago, London, Paris, or Tokyo. My definition is considerably broader and attempts to include as well many of the newer, sprawling metropolitan areas, such as my adopted hometown of Los Angeles, and also the many highly dispersed, multipolar metropolitan regions of the developing world. Although different in form from the “traditional” urban centers, these newer urban places all remain, in their essential characteristics, cities.

This leads to a second generalization about what characterizes successful cities. Since the earliest origins, urban areas have performed three separate critical functions—the creation of sacred space, the provision of basic security, and the host for a commercial market. Cities have possessed these characteristics to greater or lesser degrees. Generally speaking, a glaring weakness in these three aspects of urbanity has undermined life and led to their eventual decline.

Today, different cities in the world fulfill these functions with varying degrees of success. In the sprawling cities of the developing world, lack of a functioning economy and a stable political order loom as the most pressing problems. In many cases, people there still retain strong family ties and systems belief—whether ancient folk religions, Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism—but the basis of the material city has been undermined. This gives rise to a new historical phenomenon, the large city that grows without the familiar accrual of prosperity or power.

The essential problems facing urban regions in the West, and increasingly the developed parts of East and South Asia, are of a different nature. Cities in these regions are frequently relatively safe and, when their suburban rings are included, remarkably prosperous by historical standards. Yet these cities increasingly seem to lack a shared sense of sacred place, civic identity, or moral order.

Nothing better illustrates this than the rapid general decline in middle-class families in many of the world’s most important urban cores. Today, elite cities often attract tourists, upper-class populations working in the highest end of business services, and those who can service their needs, as well as the nomadic young, many of whom later move on to other locales. This increasingly ephemeral city seems to place its highest values on such transient values as hipness, coolness, artfulness, and fashionability.

These characteristics, however appealing in their aspect, cannot substitute for the critical, longer-lasting bonds of family, faith, civic culture, and neighborhood. Nor can a narrow transactional or recreational economy play the same role as one based on a broad diversity of industries nurturing the ambitions of upwardly mobile families. Increasingly, these families seek refuge ever farther from the urban core, often in the periphery or in smaller towns outside the urban realm.

These phenomena do not represent as severe a challenge as the miserable poverty and instability common to the cities of the developing world. Yet the study of urban history also suggests that even affluent cities without moral cohesion or a sense of civic identity are doomed to decadence and decline. It is my hope that contemporary cities—wherever they are located—can still find ways to perform their historic functions and thus make this century, the first where a majority of people live in cities, an urban century not only in demographic terms but also in more transcendent values.

The reader may not fully agree with this analysis or many of my assertions. In some ways, that is not the critical issue. This book is designed primarily not as an analysis, but as a guide, luring the reader to explore further the fundamentals of the urban experience. Once introduced to this unfolding history, the reader will, I hope, more fully appreciate the complexity of the city experience that has so enriched my life and that of my family.

INTRODUCTION:

PLACES SACRED, SAFE, AND BUSY

On November 8, 1519, Bernal Díaz del Castillo saw a sight that would remain fixed in his memory for decades to come. The twenty-seven-year-old Spanish soldier
¹
already had encountered signs of an ever intensifying urban civilization as he and his fewer than four hundred comrades marched from the humid lowlands of Mexico up into the volcanic highlands. And in a hint of what was to come, he noted “piles of human skulls,” arranged in neat rows, atop the provincial temples.
²